Zack Snyder’s Justice League has finally arrived, and with it, a surreal win for fandom. Who would have thought a rabid fanbase’s years-long tantrum-turned-movement would actually result in a major Hollywood studio yielding to their wishes? Four years ago, Zack Snyder walked away from the DC Extended Universe Warner Bros had entrusted him to shepherd through multiple movies. Facing pressure to compete with the relentlessly successful Marvel Cinematic Universes combined with critical and commercial disdain for Snyder’s Batman vs. Superman, the studio threw a barrage of story vetoes, production notes and tonal course-corrects at the director. After Snyder exited, the studio-approved cut of Justice League—which sees Batman and Superman team up with fellow heroes Wonder Woman, Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg to prevent the evil god Darkseid from coming to Earth—bombed, and the details of Snyder’s original vision lived on as internet myth.
One new streaming service in need of exciting content later, Snyder’s grand vision has been finished, revamped and uploaded to HBO Max in all of its four-hour, untampered-with glory. And the reviews, shockingly, have been pretty good. Still, the victory is bittersweet. While ZSJL is the pure, undiluted Snyder Cut fans have been clamoring for, the DC Extended Universe has moved on. Ben Affleck relinquished his cape to Robert Pattinson, who’s set to star in a totally revamped spin on Batman from writer-director Matt Reeves next year. J.J. Abrams and Ta-Nehisi Coates are developing a Superman project while Henry Cavill’s status remains…murky. Aquaman and Wonder Woman persevere as Snyder envisioned them, but their stories in solo adventures have diverged from the connected web of films he was building towards. The Snyder Cut is out in the world, but it isn’t canon.
In lieu of that, or maybe because of it, Snyder ends his film with a twenty minute sequence—all comprised of new material he shot in the months leading up to its release—that essentially serves as one big teaser for every idea, story arc and grand plan Snyder was building towards had he been allowed to stay at the helm. The scene is a flashforward, returning to the “Knightmare” vision of a dystopian future that Affleck’s Bruce Wayne had in Batman v Superman, in which an evil Superman aids in the world’s destruction, Lois Lane is dead and things are so dire Batman is willing to team up with the Joker to help restore things to the way they were before.
Whether or not you’re a fan of Snyder’s mythical, brawny, midnight dark approach to these characters, if you’ve watched Man of Steel, BvS and now this four-hour behemoth, it’s hard not to be intrigued about where Snyder was going to take things. The studio’s take on Justice League merely gestured at Darkseid as a looming threat; Snyder’s film has him front and center as a looming final boss in search of “the Anti-Life Equation.”Superfans are probably aware of the whiteboard Snyder and his collaborator, DC Chief Creative Officer Jim Lee put together that first detailed plans for a two-part Justice League film, but GQ talked to Snyder for a full breakdown on what would have happened from the man himself.
So, in a perfect world, had you been allowed to release this Justice League the way you envisioned and you stayed on—what would have happened next?
Basically, Darkseid comes to Earth. Lex Luthor has found the Anti-Life Equation. He has teamed up with The Riddler, who has deciphered the anti-life equation, and Batman’s on their trail.
The Riddler tells him, “I thought it was a riddle, but it turns out to be the end of the world.” But Lex gives the anti-life equation to Darkseid upon his arrival, along with the information that “if you kill Lois Lane”—now pregnant— “You will be able to control Superman, and he will succumb to the Anti-Life Equation.”
The Anti-Life Equation is a thing that allows you to control all will in the universe. So you can make everyone’s will your own. That makes them pretty pliable, as you can imagine. So Darkseid arrives. He gets in a fight with Superman, but he makes it to the Batcave, where Lois is hiding. Batman isn’t able to save her and Darkseid eyebeams her just as Superman shows up, and Superman, in his grief, succumbs to Anti-Life and then the Earth falls. Because with Superman on his side, you can imagine Darkseid is pretty much unstoppable.
So then we cut to a distant future, where this band of misfit superheros have stayed alive somehow throughout this entire insanity. Their plan in the future is to find one of the Mother Boxes that still remains and, using Cyborg’s genius and the power of the Mother Box, jump Flash back in time to the Batcave to give Bruce an advantage in the fight against Darkseid, so that he could save Lois.
In the meantime, while they’re hanging out—there was a scene that I had planned where Joker tells the story of killing Robin. We’d do a flashback to before the events of BvS to see a younger Bruce—not that much younger, still Ben—but we’d see what put him on that dark road. You see where his hatred for The Joker comes from and why he’s enshrined the Robin suit in the Batcave, as you’ve seen in BvS where it says, “Ha, ha, ha. The joke’s on you” spray painted on the dead body of Robin.
Meanwhile, [back in the future] The Joker knows where a stash of Kryptonite is because they need that as a weapon. [They also need him] to get them to the Mother Box. But [they fail] and just as Superman’s basically killed everybody, Flash gets out of his reach, goes down the cosmic treadmill and ends up in the Batcave. But this time at the correct moment, because remember we saw him in BvS—he jumped at the wrong time because Cyborg tells us that there’s two times that he could jump through, and picks the second one this time, not the one that he chose before.
[In this new timeline] Bruce sacrifices himself to save Lois and that gives Superman enough time to get there, and Darkseid retreats. Then the final act would be this giant war between Darkseid and all of his minions, all of the New Gods, the Fury, Granny Goodness, the whole pantheon of New Gods versus the Themysicarans who come off the island, Atlanteans rise out of the water. Wonder Woman is their new queen, and Arthur is the king of Atlantis. Then the armies of men all come together. That means the whole world, the whole army of the entire planet. They have a huge battle and they win. Then the end is this epilogue where it’s 20 years later, where Superman’s son has no powers. He’s born without the powers of a god, but then in the end, he would have become the new Batman.
The final scene would be Lois taking her son down into the Batcave and that kind of deal. So yeah, that was the epic plan. All those little Easter eggs about the future were all meant to point toward that eventual, giant battle. Then it would have been a reboot after that. You can just go back to the beginning again, where you could do a small movie with the new Batman or something.
Uh, wow. As you were envisioning this, when you mentioned significant parts for characters we hadn’t met yet like The Riddler, did you dream-cast those in your mind?
I thought [most of that arc] was going to be in Ben’s movie [Affleck planned to write, direct and star in a solo Batman film before walking away from the role] so I didn’t want to [overstep]. I had already cast Joe [Manganiello as the villain Deathstroke, who has a cameo in Justice League and would’ve appeared in Affleck’s Batman]. So I hadn’t really gone that far.
You mentioned Ben’s movie and it raises the point that when we’re talking about your plans overseeing this universe, it encompassed more than just your vision for the Justice League. There are whole side-stories interconnected that you were shepherding. The end of Justice League sets up Deathstroke for a Batman movie that never came.
It does indeed, and we also wanted Ryan Choi. I had this plan to make a movie in China with a Chinese star. The Atom was going to be there. So I don’t know. So these are some of the things we’re talking about.
Another thing about that Deathstroke-Lex Luthor scene—you’ve gone all in on the mystical, cosmic side of DC, which you basically had to in order to give all these disparate heroes a reason to unite. But seeing Lex and another villain plotting together also made me think of seeing the Legion of Doom on the big screen, too.
No, for sure that would have existed. [Lex] would have had to do a little bit of that, yea. My plan was for him to be really the mastermind of the whole turn of events. You would have seen him running things [in Darkseid’s world] from the Earth standpoint.
One thing that’s always interested me about your approach to this stuff is you don’t shy away from some of the more mystical, nerdier aspects of the lore. So when we get to a guy like Darkseid, were you planning to go all the way in on that mythology and explore people like Kalibak and Orion, the New Gods like you mentioned before…
Yeah, it’d be fun. The New Gods are the real joy here, of stuff that isn’t set up. There’s a lot of stuff there. [Jack] Kirby’s New Gods is crazy, it’s so fun. It’s its own thing and it was fun to make it real, because it’s so abstract. But then when you actually start working on a character like Darkseid, and you see him walking around, you’re like, “God, this could totally work. He’s legit. This is cool.”
The centerpiece of the Knightmare sequence is about putting Jared and Ben together, since we hadn’t seen them before. What is it that you saw in Jared— I’m unclear on whether you or David Ayer [who presented Leto’s Joker in Suicide Squad] cast him as Joker officially. But what is it about Jared that you think he brings to Joker?
I’m pretty sure it was David that cast him. I just think he’s a great actor. He’s got it. I knew I wanted to do this post-apocalyptic world, so I didn’t want to step on David’s toes. I wasn’t trying to redo that, because I have respect for what [David] did. But I also was like, okay, but in this post-apocalyptic world sometime in the future, I think all bets are off with what he is, who he is, and what he’s become. And then when Jared and I had talked about it, and I gave him the pitch and a little bit of the vibe that I wanted, he was like, “That could be cool. That could be very cool.”
Fans had guessed Harry Lennix’s military general that first appeared in Man of Steel was actually the Martian Manhunter for some time now. But why wasn’t Martian Manhunter a major part of the plot in this movie?
Well, frankly, the studio was against it and nobody wanted that. Everyone was like, “Martian Manhunter? No.” I was like, “I think it’s cool.” I had drawn that little scene with him and pitched it to everybody in post, frankly. I know [what people are] saying, “Oh, Zach came up with that idea later.” But they can say whatever they want. That’s a fine point of view, but it’s just not the case. But anyway, the whole thing with the ending is that I had a Green Lantern, and I shot it and they asked me not to put it in the movie. I was like, well, I’m not going to take a person of color out of the movie. Why don’t I just have Harry do the scene and it makes sense and it’s better. Then they told me not to shoot it. I just was like, “Look, this is the scene we shot, guys. We shot the scene with Green Lantern.” The ask is for my movie. Right? So this is the scene we shot. We hadn’t shot the Green Lantern side, but we shot Ben’s side. So then when I did the Green Lantern scene with Martian Manhunter [instead], I just reshot Ben’s side as well.
It’s crazy hearing you lay everything out so articulately and intricately, and to know that you still got this interference and resistance.
Look, the interference mostly came from the notion that these weren’t… it was a lot of “Where are the jokes? Why are you not doing what we’re asking? We’re not asking for Martian Manhunter. We’re asking for comedy. Levity. Martian Manhunter, I don’t think is that funny. “ I honestly don’t know why I got the pushback [regarding] Green Lantern. I think that they just were saying they didn’t want me doing [the] John Stewart [version of Green Lantern] in this movie. I was like, “Well, I don’t understand.” They’re like, “Well, we’re doing it.” I’m like, “When?” And also I was like, “Not to mention the fact that this is—you can cast whoever you want. I cast my guy, you cast your guy, and we’ll let the world decide who Green Lantern is.” But 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.
With the response that your cut’s been getting from fans and the reviews from critics, does it feel like a sense of validation?
I don’t really look at it that way. I’m just glad that it’s out and being seen. I’m just glad that people can experience it in a way that I had intended. That, to me, is the most satisfying part. There’s no right way. Look, if they wanted to make the movie funny, that’s their prerogative in a movie they want to make. They own the IP. It’s their thing. I really, I just see it differently. And I tried my best to—I can only do it one way. It’s hard to make a movie where you’re like “I think people will think this is funny.” That’s a disaster.
When you were filming the end sequence, was it a little bittersweet in that you were teasing this grand scope that you weren’t going to be able to actually execute?
A little bit, but I felt it was ruder to have finished this entire 10 years of DC and never had Batman and Joker meet. I was like, “That’s a tough one to swallow when we have a Batman and a Joker in the universe, and somehow they’ve never had a discussion?” That doesn’t make sense.
I’ll be frank—Superman is the main character in the final film. He was always the main character in the final film in the two movies that [would have] followed this movie. And that was the bookended aspect, that it was always going to get back to being all on Superman to lead after the death of Batman. He has to become the de facto Justice League head, to hold the team together emotionally.
After the fall of earth, he becomes the main villain and then he becomes the main good guy, which I thought was a really incredible arc for him as a character, you know?
So now that the cut is out and it’s bringing this era of your life and your time working with these characters to a close, looking back, was there anything that you wish you had done differently? Would you have done solo films before the first Justice League?
Yeah, I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about that. I think I wish we had really pushed and developed a Cyborg movie. I was pretty sure that there would have been one probably between Justice League and the next movie. I felt like we had put Cyborg on his feet at the end of Justice League, and he was pretty much ready for his own movie. That’s the thing I probably regret most, that we hadn’t pushed them far enough down the road as we did with Wonder Woman and with Aquaman, that the movies were getting made.
Jim and I could talk about doing a comic book based on the whiteboard and then I was like, “I just want to do a single run of the death of Robin. Just a little like a micro series.” Just a cool little aside because I was like, “Let’s do the comic, and then inside of the moment where, when Joker tells the story, we’ll do a micro series of comics that tells the story of Robin’s death.” Instead of putting it inside of the story, you’d buy those as a separate story.