The story of Justice League has contained no shortage of twists and turns, and you can guarantee that decades into the future, film industry scholars will be diving deep into what happened between October 2014 when the DCEU blockbuster was first announced as a two-part epic, and March 2021 when the Snyder Cut finally arrived on HBO Max.
In the middle, there’ve been directorial changes that saw Joss Whedon reshoot almost the entire movie under the watchful eye of the Warner Bros. hierarchy, only to see Justice League bomb at the box office and be widely dismissed by critics and fans. That then spawned a two and a half year social media campaign that eventually led to Snyder being rehired and handed $70 million to finish his original vision and refit the project as a four-hour behemoth, which is now set to hit streaming in a matter of weeks.
Of course, the filmmaker initially left Justice League after suffering a family tragedy, but in a recent interview, he gave more details on why he made the decision to walk away, and it sounds as though there was a lot of friction behind the scenes that just became too much to handle.
“I just was kind of done with it. I was in this place of knowing my family needs me more than this bullsh*t, and I just need to honor them and do the best I can to heal that world. I had no energy to fight the studio, and fight for the movie. Literally, zero energy for that. I really think that’s the main thing. I think there’s a different world where I stayed and kind of tried. And I’m sure I could have, because every movie is a fight, right? I was used to that. But I just did not have the energy. There was no fight in me. I had been beaten by what was going on in my life and I just didn’t want to, I didn’t care to, that was kind of where I was.”
We knew that the studio were keeping close tabs on Whedon’s reshoots, much to the detriment of the finished product, but it appears that Snyder was also facing some pushback from the boardroom, even though he’d long since been established as the DCEU’s architect and golden boy after helming Man of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.
The impending release of the Snyder Cut will finally draw a line under one of the most famously troubled productions in the history of cinema, but let’s just hope that the new version of Justice League can live up to the sky high expectations that surround it.
