After years of rumors and reports, Warner Bros. officially announced last month that Zack Snyder’s Justice League was coming to HBO Max next year. It wasn’t just the fans who celebrated the news, though, as the stars of the DCEU also poured on to social media to support the studio’s decision to share the director’s original vision of the team-up movie with the world.
The latest to do so is General Zod himself, Michael Shannon. While chatting on the LightCast Pod, Shannon broke his silence on the announcement, and it seems he couldn’t be more pleased for his friend. He may well know some secrets about the Snyder Cut, too, but he’s keeping those close to his chest for now. Instead, the actor praised the director and voiced his hope that the release of his version of JL will mean a lot to him.
“I’ll tell you what I know, my friend Zack Snyder, he had a rough go of it,” Shannon said. “Between the struggles with his family and what he went through with Warner Bros. Zack is a sweet, kind, gentle, hardworking conscientious human being. I hope that this release gives him some sort of satisfaction or vindication or whatever. Because he’s such a good person, he deserves better than what he’s been dealing with.”
Shannon played Superman’s nemesis in Snyder’s 2013 retelling of the Man of Steel’s origins, which infamously ended with Kal-El snapping Zod’s neck. Shannon has previously defended this controversial storytelling decision, another indication that he’s totally loyal to Snyder. You’d expect the pair to want to work together again, then, but as far as we know, Zod won’t appear in the Snyder Cut.
Fortunately, he’s about the only major Snyder-verse villain who won’t. Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor is known to have a bigger role in Snyder’s Justice League than he did in the theatrical cut, and this very week Snyder released the first bit of footage from his version of the film, which came in the form of a short teaser showing Gal Gadot’s Diana Prince gazing at an ancient painting of none other than Darkseid, ruler of Apokolips.
There’s some chatter about this leading to further similar projects – the Suicide Squad Ayer Cut, for instance, or maybe even Ben Affleck’s The Batman – but that remains to be seen. What we do know is that Zack Snyder’s four-hour long Justice League is due on WB’s streaming service sometime in 2021.