In a major win for the, let’s call them politely “enthusiastic,†superhero-movie fans of the internet, HBO Max will debut the infamous “Snyder Cut†of the movie Justice League in 2021. The soon-to-debut streaming service, which was pinning its release to a Friends reunion that hasn’t yet taped thanks to the coronavirus, announced the news today, when director Zack Snyder appeared on a live commentary of his film Man of Steel with Henry Cavill. The quest to uncover Snyder’s cut of the movie has existed ever since he stepped away from it in May 2017 due to a family tragedy, and Joss Whedon took over Justice League’s reshoots. Since then, devoted followers of the #ReleasetheSnyderCut hashtag have campaigned for Warner Bros. to release the version of the film that conforms to Snyder’s original, supposedly much darker vision. Years into this continuous weather pattern of a tweetstorm, HBO Max has promised to give the fans what they want … sort of.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, the Snyder Cut doesn’t actually exist yet, and Zack Snyder and his wife are “now in the midst of reassembling much of their original postproduction crew to score, cut, add new and finish old visual effects, and, yes, maybe bring back many of the actors to record additional dialogue.†The final version will take around $20 million to $30 million more to put together, THR estimates, and might end up being released as a four-hour movie or even split into six TV-episode-style chapters. We hope they spent most of that money editing Henry Cavill’s mustache back into the movie, and adding it into the non-reshoot scenes, as they should.