Justice League: Whedon's Reshoots Are Still Following Snyder's Plan
It's not as much of a redo as you might think.
There's been a lot of talk since it was announced that Joss Whedon was coming in to do reshoots on Justice League about what would remains of Zack Snyder's original vision. Rumours and speculation suggested that the early cut of the film has been ominously branded "unwatchable", and some assumption quite reasonably suggested that Whedon was coming in to de-Snyder the film.
But that's not what the latest report from Mark Hughes on Superhero News is saying. He has clarified that the reshoots on Justice League reshoots have not deviated from Zack Snyder's plans too much. So you can put aside the thought that the film has basically been reshot in its entirety to change the tool, the structure and the story, even if the reshoot schedule is much longer than you'd typically expect.
Hughes says that length is more down to complex logistics, as opposed to the amount needed to shoot:
“As of right now, despite the fact that there’s been some extended time and it’s like ‘ok, if this is still – why are they still doing shoots on this,’ there’s been a lot of downtime in between shooting because of people’s schedules – they have not been shooting this entire time. The amount of content that has been shot and is being shot is still pretty much what they expected and figured was going to be happening. They haven’t said ‘oh, we need to add additional – we need to do a whole bunch more,’ or anything like that at this point, so, the footage and the amount of footage in the film, as of right now, the majority of the footage that you’re going to see on the screen is still the footage that was previously shot during principal photography… I know I’ve seen people worried and say ‘why is it taking so long,’ it’s because this is post – this is reshooting and filming that requires people’s schedules to line up, getting things in order, so it has not been as easy as they expected it to be when this was all being planned months ago.”
It's not that surprising that the schedule is difficult to balance, since the cast are spread across the world filming other major pictures (hence the issue of Henry Cavill's moustache being so oddly big).
And Hughes says the "reshoots" aren't a matter of scenes being redone entirely, they're actually additional scenes that were planned by Snyder after the first screening of the early cut (back in 2016) to add more connective story tissue. Whedon was commissioned BY Snyder for those scenes, rather than him coming in in order to "fix" Snyder's issues.
“…it’s mostly new footage, the reshoots – and some people insist the terminology doesn’t matter and that “reshoots” is common, well no, the terminology does matter to people that make movies and know what these things are, and it matters if you’re saying something’s a “reshoot” when it’s not a reshoot – that matters, but to the extent that that’s just a technicality, the shoots and reshoots combined that are happening and then the also pickups to fill some stuff in is not going to be the majority of the film and it’s not going to be some huge vast portion of the movie. “
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That's a much more positive suggestion than the cynical one suggesting the DCEU's biggest movie yet is a disaster being cleaned up as they go along. But the film definitely isn't out of the woods yet - having such major upheaval on the set (no matter how it happens or how you choose to define it) is a massive, massive thing, and hopefully the film can overcome any issues.