Justice League official "Zack Snyder" cut on HBO Max

80%? That seems super high, but on the other hand not terribly surprising. The cool thing is that seeing as Snyder has said there will be no Whedon footage in his cut (good) we'll soon be able to see exactly what percentage of the theatrical cut belonged to each director.

 

I suspect that, if Snyder had his druthers, he would have taken his name off of the theatrical cut. He left it on because taking it off would have been a massive dose of bad publicity that would have made Warner Bros. and every other studio wary of working with him in the future. He avoided Josh Trank's mistake and didn't start slagging off on the finished film until after it came out and underperformed at the box office.

Say what you will about his filmmaking talents but he's VERY smart about playing the Hollywood game.

I liked the final season of Enterprise and I think that they totally succeeded in saving the show from a creative standpoint and even managed to do so in a way that didn't try to alienate anyone who enjoyed the earlier seasons. The problem was that it had lost too many viewers by that point and didn't have a good way to bring them back. Maybe if they'd done the Mirror Universe episode earlier or if they'd added Shran as a regular. Something big to entice the lapsed fans who loved Star Trek but were bored with the warmed over Voyager plots that Enterprise did during its first 2 seasons.

As for Justice League, all things being equal, I tend to prefer Joss Whedon movies over Zack Snyder movies. But I think that Snyder movies have their place. And I certainly don't think that even the worst Snyder movie can be improved by making it less Snyder-y. The thing is, in many ways, Snyder is a very talented filmmaker. His visuals are among the best in the business and he's good at maintaining a dark aesthetic that I enjoy. Where his movies tend to get into trouble is right at their inception, when Snyder points himself in a very wrong direction and then keeps going. The result tends to be a beautiful mistake. What he needs is not for someone with a totally different style to try to remake his films after the fact. That just results in a watered down mess that pleases no one. What he needs is a good writing & producing partner who can point him in the right direction in the first place. He needs someone to, from the very beginning, gently explain to him that Watchmen is NOT about reveling in violence and Superman movies should be about HOPE first and foremost.

 

The final season of Enterprise to me, was sugar on a turd. I believe that had the final season writing staff developed the show, it would have been much different. Let's say, "set a show before Kirk" was the mandate. You put the Reeves Stevenses in charge of that, and they come up with something much better. They also would have compiled much better writers from the beginning, and the show would have done much better than Enterprise, which was a copy of a copy of a copy, developed and written by people that were clearly out of gas and unoriginal.

By the time the 4th season writers got to it, I feel they did as much as humanly possible with the hand they were dealt, and with the exception of a few episodes, notably the finale, improved the show as much as they could.

It would have been a completely different show had the 4th season staff had it from the get go.

My issue with Snyder is that he tried to make the characters his rather than respect who the characters were. Snyder couldn't have butchered Superman more if he never heard of the character. If he is a talented filmmaker, then he should have known enough to write the characters in character. But his Superman was Batman with Superman abilities.

I think your last sentence nails it. How can you make a Superman movie where Superman doesn't inspire hope? And Batman v. Superman was a horrible idea. How much did he have to dumb down Superman to make Batman beat him? I don't care that Frank Miller wrote an overrated story 30 years ago that made Batman into the most powerful being in the universe. Batman fighting Superman is like an ant fighting a T-Rex. You can arm Batman with all the kryptonite that exists and Superman will win.

The man can move almost as fast as the Flash. Before Batman could even twitch a thumb, he would be disarmed. In that fight in Batman v. Superman, Superman could have ended the fight as soon as the kryptonite wore off. All he had to do was remove all of Batman's weapons, which he could have done easily.

Snyder fell for the "give Batman time to prepare" lunacy, not to mention the whole Martha debacle.

Snyder may be a good filmmaker, but he clearly was wrong for DC.

 

DGA regulations explicitly prevent a lot of the things that have been claimed about the circumstances surrounding Snyder's departure from having actually occurred.

 

^ The things you're citing are examples of DGA and WGA regulations bring followed, not flaunted

Also, Warner Bros. violating Snyder's DGA-protected rights would sour his working relationship with them a lot faster than him seeking to forgo said protected rights would.

 

If that's proven to be true, that's incredibly disgusting of WB.

 

I haven't been following the news behind this whole situation closely (I'm only here to temperature check this new release...), so I guess I missed that. I mean, I knew about his daughter but I didn't know that it was even suggested that the WB just used it as a cover instead of Snyder actually stepping down because of it.

Either way, the point remains: That's an incredibly disgusting thing for WB to do. I may have my issues with Snyder's directing and writing and I think the guy is an ass to fans, but no parent deserves to deal with the death of a child, especially from suicide. It's absolutely reprehensible of WB to capitalize on that situation to give him the boot.

 

Yeah, that's horrible. I remember one or two people on here saying that around the time it came out, but I always thought it was just a ridiculous click bait conspiracy theory.

 

Because we've actually seen a studio - Lucasfilm - go through the DGA-regulated process of officially replacing the person(s) in charge of directing a project, I remain dubious as to the veracity of claims that Warner Bros. were super-unhappy with Zack but did not avail themselves of the regulated process by which he could have been officially and legally removed from JL, even in the face of reporting from as credible an entity as The Hollywood Reporter.

 

My theory is that, had Snyder not been dealing with a family tragedy, he would have continued working on the film and fighting tooth & nail against Joss Whedon, Geoff Johns, et al to protect his vision for the film. But because of his daughter's suicide, it just wasn't worth the stress of keeping up the fight, so he let it go. I think that studio execs are pretty heartless most of the time but I don't think that any of them are monstrous enough to exploit a suicide like that unless there was at least some truth to it.

But either way, I don't think we're ever going to get the full story on that and that's probably for the best. It's a shame that it's had to become as public as it already has.

DGA regulations are SUPPOSED to prevent things like this from happening but they doesn't mean that they do. Thanks to their wide reach across the industry, Warner Bros. has practically all of the power in this situation. DGA rules might provide Snyder with remedies in this situation but making a big fuss against a big studio on one of their most expensive tentpole films would almost certainly be career suicide. Snyder couldn't afford to just worry about this film. He had to worry about all of the films that he would make after it.

That's not to say that the DGA should let this stand. I think that it would be very interesting if they set up their own independent investigation of what happened here.

I think some of it depends on the temperament of the directors in question. Zack Snyder and Gareth Edwards were willing to play ball with the studio, so they kept their credits. Lord & Miller told Lucasfilm to piss off, so Lucasfilm had to resort to more formal measures to have them removed.

I also suspect that Warner Bros. didn't originally anticipate having to reshoot that much of Justice League (or having to spend so much money doing it). I think that they thought that they would just get Whedon in for a few pickup scenes and then they'd be good. It was only later when the process ballooned into a full-on reshoot.

 

Hmmm. I wonder who else does that? I agree that sure is annoying.

 

The irony is.....astounding.

 

I wasn't going to say it...but I'm glad it was said.

 

I do agree it is indisputable that kirk55555 states what he thinks. As do we all.