When the penultimate trailer for Zack Snyder’s Justice League dropped, fans couldn’t believe what they were hearing. Not only did the promo end on the first look at Jared Leto’s returning Joker in action, but he even started off his dialogue by saying ‘we live in a society,’ sending the internet into meltdown.
The meme originated from Seinfeld, but it’s been linked to the Clown Prince of Crime for a long time, and folks also petitioned to have it included in Todd Phillips’ Joker to no avail. It was clear that Snyder keeps his ear to the ground of online culture, although he did admit recently that Leto was the one responsible for improvising the line.
However, when the filmmaker’s four-hour opus premiered on HBO Max, some people were left dismayed by the fact that the Joker doesn’t actually say it. Instead, we get a fantastic interaction between Leto’s Jester of Genocide and Ben Affleck’s Batman, one that involves talk of a reach-around and the villain calling Amber Heard’s Mera a smelly old flounder.
In a new interview, Snyder explained why ‘we live in a society’ didn’t make the final edit of the Snyder Cut, and it’s all to do with the flow of the scene and how Leto ad-libbed a lot of his material during his heated exchange opposite the Dark Knight.
“Yes there was a version of that, what I was trying to do was a second for the black and white version of the movie, for the charity version of the movie. here’s a second ending of the movie, of the Jared Leto scene, that included that line. The truth is, it’s an either or moment. When Batman gives the Harley Quinn speech, you either go, ‘We live in a society’, or we do what we did in the movie, and I just thought, the society thing is cool, and maybe one day we’ll all see it, but I also did very much like the broken, the tricked, the vulnerable Joker that you see in the movie. So it’s a trade off of not getting the vulnerable Joker, you get the line, which is cool, and I like it.”
If felt like a little bit of troll job for Snyder to put it in the trailer and not the version that debuted on HBO Max, but his reasoning makes sense, and the verbal duel between Batman and the Joker in Justice League is still one of the most talked-about scenes in the movie, even if it didn’t reference the meme.