After years of fan campaigning and cryptic, enigmatic teases about the existence of a “Snyder Cut,” Zack Synder finally got to bring his vision for a “Justice League” movie to life, even if he had to shoot it himself without Warner Bros. permission.
Speaking with Cinemablend, Snyder confessed that even despite releasing his version of “Justice League” and spending millions of dollars to finish it, Warner Bros. did have a few rules on what he could and couldn’t do, and he went ahead and did them anyway. “I’ll just be frank. The studio didn’t want me to shoot anything [new],” Snyder said. “One of the rules of making the Snyder Cut was that the studio said no shooting of any kind. And then I just, of course, shot stuff anyway. Because suddenly, wait, there’s rules now on this? I didn’t know. (laughs) That seems unfair. It’s called Snyder Cut. And frankly there are those caveats because there were a lot of things — and I won’t list them here — that the studio did not want me to have in my version of the movie. And I think, frankly, that was all just because they have their own cinematic universe, and that’s great. And they were afraid that what I did might… because they consider the theatrical cut as canon, and my cut as the Elseworld, other kind of cul-de-sac. We know the terms.”
“And so they were like, ‘Please don’t do anything.’ Like, no Darkseid coda. That can’t be in there,” he explained further about the studio asking for now extra scenes that teased his “Justice League 2” and beyond. “Those are the kinds of things that were in there. But I looked and I was like, ‘Sure, okay, great. Do it.’ I mean, I didn’t mean to be subversive and rude. But that was the thing that fans wanted. The deal I had made with the world was that they were going to get the unencumbered Zack Snyder version of ‘Justice League.’ I don’t think anybody in the same position I was would feel any… I wasn’t cheating. I wasn’t doing like, ‘Oh, you broke the rules! That’s uncool.’ But no, I think that, they’ve got like a whole bunch of movies. I have one.”
One of the scenes Snyder went ahead and shot without the studio’s permission involved a Green Lantern talking to Lois Lane, which later got nixed by the studio. “I honestly don’t know why I got the pushback [regarding] Green Lantern,” he told GQ. ” I think that they just were saying they didn’t want me doing [the] John Stewart [version of Green Lantern] in this movie.” According to Snyder, the studio was planning on doing their own version of the character, so they didn’t want a competing actor in the same role. In the end, Snyder managed to trade that deleted scene for another. “I was able to leverage that. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll take him out. But you gotta let me replace him with Martian Manhunter and you gotta let me shoot my post-apocalyptic scene,’ because those are the two things they weren’t going to do.”