Back when the Snyder Cut wasn’t even a pipe dream, and we’d all resigned ourselves to the fact that Joss Whedon’s Justice League was the one and only version of the movie we were getting, the buildup was almost entirely overshadowed by the furor surrounding Henry Cavill’s mustache.
Never mind the fact that the production had suffered a directorial change midway through, resulting in almost the entire thing being reshot with Whedon operating under strict orders from the studio brass that had pushed the budget towards $300 million, it was Superman’s facial fuzz that was the main talking point.
Having grown a mustache for Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Warner Bros. could either financially compensate Paramount for having to shut down the spy sequel so Cavill could grow his whiskers back in, or they could digitally erase it. WB chose the latter, which sounded like a straightforward thing to do. After all, CGI has made the impossible possible, so how difficult could it be to remove a mustache?
Very, as it turned out. The prologue of Justice League was the stuff of nightmares, and now a rare behind the scenes photo of Cavill on set with his glorious mustache has arrived online for everyone to see courtesy of DCUVerse, which you can check out below.
The strangest thing about the mustache debacle is that people sat in a screening room, looked at whatever the hell Cavill’s upper lip was doing in that prologue, and still signed it off to be the very first thing audiences saw in the movie. That sums up Joss Whedon’s Justice League in a nutshell, but at least the Snyder Cut is only a couple of weeks away to erase it from existence.