The theatrical edition of Justice League infamously clocked in at exactly 120 minutes because the studio demanded that the movie run for no longer than two hours, meaning that there are vast swathes of footage that never saw the light of day from either the Zack Snyder or Joss Whedon eras of production.
Snyder has already hinted that up to 75% of his cut could be comprised of footage that’s never been seen before, and after gathering the cast together once again for additional photography, you’d have thought that the filmmaker was crafting an extensive number of new scenes, especially when Jared Leto’s Joker and Joe Manganiello’s Deathstroke have both been brought in from the DCEU’s cold storage.
However, despite confirmation that the Snyder Cut will arrive as a four-episode miniseries that runs for at least four hours, the 300 and Sucker Punch director claims that he’s only shot four or five minutes of fresh footage, with the rest of the all-new Justice League being cobbled together from what he originally filmed four and a half years ago.
“I think it’s valid, on one hand though, I will say that in the end it’s going to probably be about four minutes or five minutes of additional photography for the entire movie. In the four hours that is Justice League, maybe four minutes.”
It says a lot about how heavily Justice League was butchered in post-production that Snyder only needs a few extra minutes to tie together his original vision for the project, even though it’ll run for twice as long as the maligned theatrical cut. The 54 year-old has already made it clear that anything with Whedon’s fingerprints on it is going to be completely ignored, and with a budget rumored to be in the ballpark of $70 million, the visual effects work is clearly going to be the driving force behind the majority of that expenditure if only a handful of extra scenes are being filmed.