For all the people who complained that Man of Steel and Batman V Superman showed an unnecessarily violent, mopey and uninspiring Superman, wait till you find out what Zack Snyder had planned for the character in Justice League.
While fans’ demand for the Snyder Cut of the DC heroes’ team-up movie is growing louder every day, Warner Bros. continues to turn a deaf ear to their pleas. Nevertheless, director Zack Snyder has dropped plenty of hints as to the nature of the film he was intending to make until a personal tragedy forced him to step away from the project.
The Snyder version of Justice League would have drawn very heavily from the Knightmare sequence in Batman V Superman, where Bruce Wayne has a dream/foretelling of a world ruled by an evil Man of Steel who believes the Dark Knight was responsible for the death of Lois Lane. While the Knightmare was ignored entirely by the version of the film released by Warner Bros., it was the basis of the story Snyder planned on telling with Justice League.
After Joss Whedon was brought on as the new director, extensive reshoots were carried out, with most of the new scenes involving Superman and his now infamous CGI face. This clearly points towards the fact that the Big Blue Boy Scout envisioned by Snyder was to be a vastly different character from the Whedon version we ultimately got to see.
In fact, we know that the Superman in the Snyder cut would have been resurrected and brainwashed by the original main villain of the movie, Darkseid, Lord of the Planet Apokolips, to act as his general in the conquest of Earth. This would have bought him into direct conflict with the Justice League.
It then would’ve fallen to Batman and the members of the League to remind Superman of his heroic nature and break him free of Darkseid’s influence, just in time for a final team-up of all the heroes against Steppenwolf and the forces of Apokolips. Of course, we’ll never get to see any of that now, but it’s interesting to think about how things could’ve turned out if Snyder had gotten the chance to complete the film.