Very shortly after Zack Snyder’s Justice League was officially announced, the director made it perfectly clear that he wasn’t going to use a single frame shot by Joss Whedon after he’d initially departed the project, and he’d cobble together his own cut from the footage he’d captured during the six-month shoot before he stepped down and the Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator was brought in as his replacement by Warner Bros.
According to various reports emanating from the production at the time, under the watchful eye and explicit instruction of the studio, Whedon reshot up to 75% of Snyder’s work to deliver a version of Justice League that was to the boardroom’s liking. Unfortunately, however, that version was terrible and bombed at the box office, leading directly to the genesis of the Snyder Cut as we know it today.
Of course, there’s a surprising amount of shared footage between both cuts of Justice League, confirming that a lot more of Snyder’s original scenes made it into the theatrical release than most people expected, but we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones who told us Ben Affleck was returning as Batman in The Flash long before it was confirmed – that WB tried to convince the filmmaker to incorporate some of Whedon’s material into his HBO Max exclusive.
Presumably, this was a move by the studio to try and limit costs. Theoretically, instead of building an entire scene from the ground up using costly visual effects, the brass may have nudged Snyder in the direction of using what would essentially be the same shot, albeit from a different director. Naturally, though, he appears to have refused their overtures, which is hardly surprising when he’s still never even seen the first attempt at Justice League.
