Zack Snyder has directed eight movies during his career, with the ninth arriving this year when zombie heist actioner Army of the Dead hits Netflix, and so far he’s revisited five of them. Indeed, Snyder seems to have the Ridley Scott problem, where he can’t leave any of his films alone for too long before diving back in to make some alterations.
His debut feature Dawn of the Dead was given a Director’s Cut that ran for ten minutes longer, his preferred version of Watchmen added an extra 24 minutes of footage, and the Ultimate Cut is the lengthiest comic book movie ever made at a butt-numbing 216 minutes. Sucker Punch, meanwhile, arrived on home video bundled with an Extended Cut, the Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice Ultimate Edition runs for an extra half an hour and is vastly superior to the theatrical release, and there’s also the small matter of HBO Max’s upcoming Justice League.
300, animated family adventure Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole and Man of Steel are the only ones not to have been tinkered with long after the fact, but that could be about to change in the case of the latter. Snyder is already working on a remastered version of Batman V Superman, and in a new interview he admitted that Superman’s origin story could be in line for the same treatment.
“I think it’s worth a look, it probably does need a remaster. It’s been a while since we’ve taken a look at it. Batman v Superman happened because we had noticed that there was a color mistake in one of the releases. We just looked into it and I was like, ‘Hey, what happened?’. I guess it’s a technical snafu but I was like, ‘This is a great opportunity for us to go back and fix it and do the IMAX release and let everybody see every bit of it, see the whole movie’.”
Man of Steel frequently finds itself trending online as DCEU fans continue to celebrate the blockbuster that started it all, so there’s definitely an audience who would be willing to see it in an entirely new visual light, especially if the Batman V Superman remaster proves popular enough to warrant another return to the well.