Batman v Superman Was Originally FOUR Hours Long
Talk about poor directing...
Of all the criticisms that Batman v Superman has attracted since release, one of the most pertinent has been the question of editing. Even for an overlong film aimed squarely at earning an "epic" label, the lack of restraint and the uneven pacing made it feel like it was rushed, underdeveloped in key places and poorly conceived altogether.
That disjointed feel might have something to do with the fact that Zack Snyder seemingly put in more than an hour more than he even intends to use in the R-Rated director's cut. That's a stunning amount of flab that had to be excised by editor David Brenner.
Perhaps that's why the first hour hurtles along at a break-neck speed, why most of the new characters lack any development and why there's no real sense of Bruce Wayne in the film at all. And you've really got to think that maybe trimming the script before attempting to shoe-horn it in to a "conventional" run-time was a better approach than having to cut manically in the edit?
"It was a lot to juggle. So the plot lines of a couple characters had to go. These people are currently in the movie but we dont track them, and its okay. Whats kind of fun is that we went back and did an extended cut where we put a lot of this stuff back, and we refined it into the same rhythm as the theatrical release. So what was once a nearly four-hour cut with absolutely everything was ridiculous ended up being about a three-hour cut, once all these added story lines were refined with the fat was cut out."
So what was this fat? Presumably, the whole storyline involving Jenna Malone was in there, plus the Communion deleted scene we'd already seen of Lex Luthor facing whatever alien that was. Jesse Eisenberg has also hinted that there was more of his motivation - possibly including answers to whether he's already working with Darkseid - in the script:
"Its a very complicated mythology that I was able to wrap my head around while we were filming, but I think there were certain editorial choices that I was not aware of that they put in retroactively.
his isn't the first time Brenner has had to cut a lot of content: for Man Of Steel he had to take out an hour - because that's "the way Zack likes to work". Surely that's an indication of a broken approach?