Justice League: The Real Story Of The Snyder Cut
3. Snyder's Vision
It seems simple enough to start both with the suggested length - 3 and a half hours - and with the assertion that Snyder's tone would have been significantly darker. And that it would have been consistent, which is one of the biggest issues with Justice League. Even the replacement of Junkie XL's original score with Danny Elfman's speaks of a fundamental development of tone. There has always been some suggestion that Snyder's fans love his work because he refuses to cow to comic book movie tropes and conventions - the safety blanket of Marvel, basically - and that his stories are "for grown-ups" but his cut WOULD have been a comic book movie. Subversive does not mean a betrayal. It's just a shame - for his fans, at least - that Warner Bros couldn't accept as much.
The problem for them was that Superman and Batman ranked the lowest of all of the superheroes in Justice League. Combine that with Snyder killing Superman and planning on killing Batman in the sequel (according to leaked plans) and you can see why the studio might have started to believe those suggestions that Snyder DID hate their merchandise selling flagship characters. After all, the MCU was built on Iron Man and Captain America - they didn't die at the end of the start of the franchise.
The changes to Snyder's cut - in terms of balance of characters - suggests that's where Warner Bros' thinking was. In the Snyder Cut, many of the characters were given a lot more to do and there were significantly more characters involved than we even got to see. The Flash, Aquaman and Cyborg were more than the glorified cameos they became in the theatrical version, all of them were darker than we got to see (Flash went from being a legitimate action hero badass to a bit of a greenhorn) and Batman and Superman were CONSCIOUSLY sidelined as story elements rather than the most important parts.
That's why Whedon shot pretty much all of Superman's scenes again. There might be a couple remaining from Snyder's shooting, but the digitally removed moustache gives away the extent of how much was redone and it looks like basically all of it. The reason, clearly, is that Whedon's agenda was to make Superman the heart of his movie, where Snyder had quite openly stated that Cyborg was the heart of his...
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