A few years ago the Justice League movie was released. It should have been epic, but it wasn’t. It drove Affleck out of the Batman role and reminded everyone that Marvel is in a league of their own. Soon rumors began that the original director, Zack Snyder had completed a cut of the movie. #ReleasetheSnyderCut was born. Don’t get me wrong, this might not be great. Zack did cast these roles very well. He cast Gal Gadot, Ben Affleck, and Henry Cavil. All of whom were great as Wonder Woman, Bat Man, and Superman. Affleck looked like the comic came alive. Well now the Snyder Cut is being released on HBOMax.
During a recent interview with Business Insider, HBO Max Content Chief Kevin Reilly was asked how long discussions about this version of the film have been happening, and it sounds like they’ve been going on behind the scenes for a while as fans have continued to campaign for Warner Bros. to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut.
“I forget when Zack and Deborah [Snyder] first gave us the sense of where they were heading, but even from that meeting, me and my team felt it was something we really wanted to do,” he says.
“There were a lot of issues involved to figure out how we could deliver on his vision, and a myriad of legal issues,” Reilly continued. “We’ve been sitting on this for quite some time but working on it. It was obviously a secret project given the high level of interest, but we were chipping away at it piece by piece. There was some strategy but also some serendipity in how we got over the hurdle of some of those issues just before the launch [of Max].”
Asked to elaborate on what some of those issues were, he responded: “That’s a whole separate interview [laughs]. Let’s file that as a follow up.”
It certainly sounds like it was a complicated process to make Zack Snyder’s Justice League happen, and in a separate interview, Chairman of WarnerMedia and head of HBO Max, Bob Greenblatt, said, “It does not exist. Zack is actually building it…I wish it was just $30 million & stop there.”
When Justice League was a let down, it led to rumors of Cavil being out as Superman. Now, that might not be the case.
Deadline is reporting that Henry Cavill (Mission: Impossible – Fallout; The Witcher) is currently in talks with Warner Bros. to reprise his fan-favorite role as Superman in the studio’s retooled live-action DC cinematic universe.
However, while common sense would point to the actor donning the cape for a Man of Steel sequel, the trade notes that a standalone follow-up to the 2013 Zack Snyder-directed feature is not in any stage of development and that they intend on bringing him back in a different capacity, presumably for an extended role in another upcoming DC adventure.
Both Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 and James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad have already wrapped, so don’t expect him to pop up in either of those, and DHD sources have confirmed that he’s not slated to make a cameo in Matt Reeves’ upcoming The Batman. This leaves the door open for a number of DC projects that have yet to roll cameras, including David F. Sandberg’s Shazam! sequel starring Zachary Levi, Jaume Collet-Serra’s Black Adam starring Dwayne Johnson, and James Wan’s Aquaman sequel starring Jason Momoa.
All of this because the fans made their voices heard. I wonder what this will open the door for in other aspects of the entertainment universe.
