The Justice League saga was fascinating from start to finish, right from Zack Snyder first calling action on the DCEU’s all-star movie in April 2016 to his four-hour epic arriving on HBO Max almost exactly five years later.
In the meantime, Joss Whedon reshot huge swathes of the project to push the budget up towards the $300 million mark, only for it to bomb at the box office and be scorched by critics and fans. This directly caused the mobilization of Snyder’s supporters, setting off a lightbulb in the heads of the Warner Bros. brass who realized they could use it to sell their new streaming service to the masses and generate a huge amount of both revenue and publicity in the process, leading to Zack Snyder’s Justice League.
Just when you thought a line had finally been drawn under the movie, the #RestoreTheSnyderVerse movement then came along, with fans now relentlessly calling on the studio to continue the arc that kicked off in the summer of 2013 with Man of Steel. There’s been an avalanche of regularly conflicting stories making the rounds in recent weeks, but a new report offers the entirely plausible tale that there’s a civil war brewing behind the scenes at WarnerMedia.
As per Small Screen, HBO Max’s Chief Content Officer Casey Bloys would love to continue the Justice League‘s adventures on streaming, but Warner Bros.’ film division, led by CEO Ann Sarnoff, and DC Films president Walter Hamada want to sweep the whole thing under the rug and move forward, leading to a lot of fighting within the company. There’s a ton of money potentially at stake, too, with various legal and contractual hoops to jump through first, but it’s been made pretty clear that the online campaigns and social media movements aren’t going anywhere until the warring parties come to an agreement and decide once and for all if the SnyderVerse will continue or not.
