Zack Snyder only got to shoot one new scene for his HBO Max exclusive version of Justice League, but he managed to pack plenty of talking points and fan service into those brief few minutes of the epilogue that took place in the Knightmare timeline.
Whenever you see an interview with the filmmaker, there’s a 99% chance that the world ‘cool’ will come up at least once, which has been one of the main driving forces behind a career that’s boasted plenty of ambitious worldbuilding and stylish action, but not a lot of depth on the narrative side of things.
However, the one brief exchange between Ben Affleck’s Batman and Jared Leto’s Joker was loaded with subtext ranging from their longstanding status as Gotham City adversaries, to a dying Harley Quinn urging the Dark Knight to kill her former flame slowly via the Clown Prince of Crime repeatedly needling his opposite number over his failure to save Robin from a fiery death.
Snyder revealed that he planned to explore the Joker murdering the Caped Crusader’s sidekick and burning Wayne Manor to the ground in his Justice League sequels, too, and we’ve now heard from our sources – the same ones who told us the Snyder Cut was coming to HBO Max long before it was first announced – that even more hints of the Boy Wonder’s demise were included in the film, but left out of the four-hour epic. Apparently, there would’ve been another scene with the Clown Prince of Crime involving Robin’s death, though the exact details on what we could’ve seen in it remain unclear.
We know that Jared Leto went heavy on the improvisation, though, which is why the ‘we live in a society’ line and his crown of thorns were absent from the finished product, so any additional references to the hero’s death were probably omitted in favor of Snyder giving the actor the leeway to ensure that his brief return in Justice League would erase the memories of his polarizing Suicide Squad performance.
