Warner Bros. will be hosting a 24-hour free virtual convention called DC FanDome. It takes place on Saturday, August 22, 2020, and can be streamed from here. The event is being advertised as the place to get the latest exciting updates regarding the DCEU. One exciting thing to look for is further details revealed about the Snyder Cut of Justice League.

 

 

For this post, I am going to briefly recap the theatrical Justice League movie and then cover what we know about the Snyder Cut.  This is everything you need to know leading up to DC FanDome, including an interesting decision on the table about how it will be shown due to its runtime.

Justice League Theatrical Release

Zack Snyder stepped down during the post-production of the film to grieve with his family following the loss of his daughter. Warner Bros. hired The Avengers director Joss Whedon to take the helm. The studio did not like what they had seen from Snyder's work on the film, so they charged Whedon with overhauling much of the movie. This involved script rewrites (including 80 new pages), scene re-shoots more humor and an overall brighter tone.

Despite these massive changes, the release date remained the same, so the filmmakers had no additional time to fine-tune the movie but had to keep to the same schedule. Some of the reasons behind why Warner Bros. decided to not push back the release date were so that executives could still get their annual bonuses, and also, because there was an upcoming merger between AT&T and Time Warner, they were concerned about the possibility AT&T might decide to scrap the movie altogether if it was not completed before then.

Only about 1/4th of Snyder's contribution was kept. The run time was cut down from over three and a half hours to two hours. When presented to test audiences the theatrical version scored about as well as Wonder Woman did, so Warner Bros decided to release it. Justice League was generally received poorly among critics and general audiences were not crazy. It had a disappointing performance at the box office. Justice League cost $300 million to make and market. It only made a little over $700 million total, which includes global box office and subsequent DVD sales

The Snyder Cut

Immediately following its release a social media campaign was started to show the Snyder Cut of Justice League.
Many of the cast and film crew supported it, and a petition for this cause gained 180,000 signatures. The powers that be were ultimately pressured into the decision to let Snyder complete the film the way he wants. The plan is it will not have a theatrical release but will be available through the streaming service HBO Max.

Now for the Snyder Cut, HBO will shell out an additional large sum of money, in excess of $30 million dollars, for Zack Snyder to finish the film the way he wants.

The funding will go to post-production, special effects, a new film score, and additional ADR from the actors, but it will not contain any new scenes with the actors. It will, however, contain many characters that were cut out of the original version, including:

The film is still being completed, so the run time is not yet solid. However, it is reported that the run time of the film will be greater than 3 1/2 hours. For this reason, there is an interesting decision on the table for HBO Max. The idea of airing the film as a mini-series instead of a movie is being considered. The Snyder cut of Justice League will be released exclusively on HBO Max sometime in 2021.

There will be more news to come during the upcoming DC FanDome, so stay tuned!