Not long after Zack Snyder’s Justice League was finally made a reality and confirmed to be heading exclusively to HBO Max, the filmmaker revealed that up to 75% of the footage will have never been seen before. Since then, Snyder has confirmed that he won’t be using a single frame shot by his successor Joss Whedon, while reshoots have also taken place that added Jared Leto’s Joker and Joe Manganiello’s Deathstroke to the cast for what are widely expected to be Knightmare sequences.
The theatrical edition of Justice League famously ran for exactly 120 minutes after the studio demanded that the movie be no longer than two hours, and with the Snyder Cut being at least twice that length, there must have been absolute mountains of footage left on the cutting room floor throughout the troubled production. In fact, in a recent interview, the 300 and Sucker Punch director once again reiterated that huge swathes of his cut will be entirely new to audiences despite the fact that he initially filmed it over four years ago.
“Don’t also forget that it is probably a solid two-and-a-half hours of unseen footage in this movie, I would imagine. Something like that. It’s going to be fun for everyone to experience for the first time.”
To put that into perspective, the unseen footage that Snyder is adding back into Justice League runs longer than the movie that was released into theaters to a widely apathetic response from critics and fans in the first place. Reports have always varied about how much of the film was reshot by Whedon at the Warner Bros.’ request, and the answer appears to be almost all of it.
Snyder’s additional shooting has only added four or five minutes onto the four-hour running time as well, which just reinforces the notion that next year’s HBO Max exclusive is as good as a brand new movie, and will be embraced by the fanbase as the definitive version of Justice League.
