To put it bluntly, the theatrical edition of Justice League is a mess. Not only are the seams between Zack Snyder’s original footage and Joss Whedon’s extensive reshoots very noticeable and incredibly jarring, but the higher-ups at Warner Bros. added an unwanted third party into the mix when they became heavily involved in the production.
Having already butchered David Ayer’s Suicide Squad beyond recognition and commissioned multiple edits to retroactively find the movie they were looking for, they also gave plenty of notes to both of the directors that tackled Justice League, including the mandate that it run for no longer than two hours, which is why the original cut of the DCEU’s all-star outing is over and done with in exactly 120 minutes.
In a recent interview to continue hyping his reassembled and much more epic-looking version of Justice League, Zack Snyder admitted that he thought the studio was joking when they first informed him about the movie’s maximum length.
“I really thought it was a joke. I mean, Batman v Superman is a full three hours, and that’s two characters.”
Snyder’s previous entries in the DCEU weren’t exactly slim, with Man of Steel clocking in at 143 minutes, while Batman V Superman ran longer at 152, and even then there still wasn’t enough time to allow the huge cast and countless subplots to make much of an impression, with the Ultimate Edition adding a further 29 minutes of additional footage and still feeling like it left a lot of narrative ground to cover.
Luckily for both the director and the fans, Zack’s got free reign when it comes to putting the Snyder Cut together, and following the news that the all-new Justice League will be released in four hour-long installments, he’s now got twice the amount of time to tell the story that he was originally given.
