Whether you’re a member of the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut faithful, someone that thinks Zack Snyder has a fundamental misunderstanding of superhero storytelling, or somewhere in between, everyone can agree that the filmmaker’s DCEU films have their faults. No movie is perfect, and when you talk about “Man of Steel,” “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” and “Justice League,” there are plenty of scenes to deconstruct to find out what happened behind-the-scenes to lead to the finished product.
And at the recent Director’s Cut event (via Stephen M. Colbert), where Snyder screened some of his previous films, the director opened up about some of the more controversial decisions he made on the latter two films, ‘BvS’ and “Justice League,” that continue to drive debate amongst fans.
Of course, you can’t talk about debatable scenes in a Snyder film without mentioning the infamous “Martha” scene from ‘BvS.’ For those that didn’t watch the film, the scene comes at the tail-end of the fight between the titular heroes, where Batman realizes that Superman’s mother is named Martha, and therefore, they are suddenly friends. The scene is mocked quite a bit amongst film fans, and Snyder defended it over the weekend.
“We reached that point in our discussions,” Snyder said. “We knew how to get them to fight, but how do we get them to stop fighting? We knew we had to get Batman to recognize his humanity. Superman in many ways is more human than Batman, he’s really embraced that.”
According to the report, writer Chris Terrio was the one responsible for noticing that both Superman and Batman’s mothers were named Martha. Snyder said, “Look, it’s a mythological construct, I have no problem with that part of it.”
As we know, response to ‘BvS’ was decidedly mixed, with the film earning a bunch of money at the box office, but being generally savaged by critics and a decent amount of fans. It was the critical reception that apparently led Warner Bros. to begin the process of changing up Snyder’s plans for the future of the DCEU, beginning with “Justice League.”
“When this movie came out, understand that Chris Terrio and I had finished the script to ‘Justice League’ before ‘BvS’ came out,” explained Snyder. “Some people didn’t like the movie. A vocal minority. So they said, ‘There’s a lot of stuff we don’t want you to do. So, we did a rewrite from that script.”
So the original ‘Justice League’ script, we didn’t even shoot. The really scary version. Because we were really nervous after the response.”
Of the things that were seemingly cut from “Justice League” (it’s not known whether it was cut from Snyder’s original version of the film or the first draft that was altered before filming) is the follow-up to the “Knightmare” sequence from ‘BvS,’ where Batman is seen wandering a post-apocalyptic landscape and Superman is shown to be evil.
Snyder revealed his intention with the Knightmare scene from ‘BvS:’
“The truth is that the Knightmare sequence in this movie is always something that I intended to explain and we end up in a future Earth where Superman has succumbed to the Anti-Life equation and there’s a few surviving members of the Justice League, and a broken Cyborg was working with Batman to send Flash back to warn Bruce. There was a scene in the trailer, apparently, it didn’t make it into the movie, where Bruce says Flash came to him and warned him that ‘Lois was the key’ and something darker was coming.”
Interestingly enough, fans were able to ask plenty of questions and somehow didn’t seem to ask anything about the Snyder Cut of “Justice League,” outside of a random outburst. So, at this point, it appears all we might get from that version of the film is whatever Snyder shared this weekend and whatever else leaks in the future.
And the live stream is up. #SnyderCon pic.twitter.com/ZDfbVLlF5K
— ☕Stephen M. Colbert (@smcolbert) March 25, 2019