The Stone, The Spear, and The Superman, Part 5: Whatever Happened To Uniting The Seven?
David: So: this whole final stretch is a clusterfuck, huh. At least as much to think about here is a matter of the surrounding context as it is these storyboards for sequels to a movie they no longer even function as the follow-ups to. While Snyder’s revealed his intentions for his intended Justice League sequels for years piecemeal, the leak online of Jim Lee-penciled, Geoff Johns-lettered storyboards circa December 2015 from the 2021 “The Dreamscapes of Zack Snyder’s Justice League: An Exclusive Exhibit” accompanying the release of ZSJL gave an unredacted look at the broad intended outline. It’s largely only available now as a ‘colorized’ version via Mariano Chikko, and the outline is both a diversion from his original intent for the series and decisions Snyder ultimately went on to make with the first Justice League, but: we’ve got what we’ve got to work with here.
Sean: In many regards, this is going to be a bit of a different approach from us. Where previously we have been engaging criticism, here we will be doing archeology. A movie that’s as real as Goncharov and just as interesting.
David: I hear that was also one of Snyder’s preeminent influences.
Ritesh: Katya was always his favorite character I’m told.
David: Speaking of surrounding context and how wild this is from minute one: these storyboards aren’t just illustrated by Jim Lee, they’re lettered by Geoff Johns, the devil of the Snyder cult cosmology for what turned out to be in large part pretty thoroughly justified reasons, and the guy who’d more or less take over the DC films after Zack’s departure before utterly crashing and burning. The prospect of them collaborating in any shape should be absurd, but Geoff’s fingerprints are aaaaall over this thing if you understand what you’re looking for.
Ritesh: It is New 52 as hell, let’s put it like that.
Sean: I think the most telling part is the description of the Green Lantern in the FIVE YEARS LATER section. Throughout the images by Lee, we see what we’d expect from a first Green Lantern: Hal Jordan. But the actual pitch document never refers to him as Hal (even as it sets up the Hal/Barry relationship). Indeed, by the way it’s written (especially the line “His partner from Earth”), the pitch heavily implies that the Lantern in this film isn’t even human.
Which is to say I think the Green Lantern of Justice League was going to be Sinestro. (Though Snyder has noted that it was supposed to be John Stewart before studio heads shot it down for Martian Manhunter.)
David: Johns being involved here actually, in a way, makes sense though? Because this whole first movie is dancing around getting back to what Snyder likely wanted the end of JL1 to be in the first place - the team isn’t even assembled outside of the opening scene. To explain that though requires some major context, which is that not only was this (as noted in the storyboards themselves) originally meant to be a Justice League duology rather than a trilogy, but Steppenwolf was initially meant to be the villain of David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, not Justice League, which makes perfect sense when he’s a chump working off a sentence. That presumably was going to be able to kick off with Darkseid immediately, and given I seem to recall Snyder mentioning his original ending for that was too dark for WB, it’s easy to assume it went down something like this:
His original JL ends with Superman getting brought back, Darkseid takes control while he’s still pliable, we end on Knightmare.
WB goes ‘no, your last two movies pissed everyone off, you aren’t allowed to end our first Justice League with Superman destroying the world, we need our Avengers to have a clean win happy ending’.
Zack splits the first part into two movies, Steppenwolf is moved up to be the villain of #1, and #2 is spent resetting the board to what it was initially meant to be (including Superman being all ‘CLARK KENT IS DEAD’ so he can still be sort of malleable and distinctly not at the conclusion of his arc yet), and honestly you can tell his heart’s not in it the same way so Geoff’s brought in to handle a lot of the structure of said stalling with the Injustice League of it all.
Obviously that’s speculation on my part, but I think you’d agree reasonably responsible, well-informed speculation?
Ritesh: The Johns tell isn’t the GL stuff for me. It’s the Aquaman stuff, which if you’ll remember, all of that ‘Unite The Seven’ shit with The Seven Kingdoms is all him. He was gonna even do that Rise Of The Seven Seas event/story that he never ended up actually delivering. And he’s the guy that came up with all the ‘mythos’ and those Seven Factions. So The Unseen? Yeah, that’s Geoffrey baby. And you know what else is Geoffrey? Captain Cold. And Wonder Woman, which is a project he’s consistently had a hand in. The Villain side of things is Geoff’s DC lane, and he personally overwrote much of Suicide Squad to begin with, and don’t forget all that Deathstroke business from his Batman movie with Affleck. Plus Orm/Black Manta are really his guys and his big revamps. So the whole Lex League shit here? Super Johns.
David: Oh god, of COURSE that’s what the Unite The Seven stuff was about. And as I said, Injustice Gang is I think Geoff super-duper heavy lifting for what Zack isn’t interested in; even Riddler’s final moments resemble his attempt at a murder-suicide in his Batman: Earth One Volume 2.
Sean: Oh right, that exists.
David: And not only is the Wonder Woman prophecy bit extremely Johns…Snyder doesn’t even do anything with it! The likes of Deadshot being replaced with Deathstroke in the Knightmare, Wonder Woman and Aquaman dying in different ways, Menalippe being in Man’s World, and Lex needing to summon Darkseid are normal incidents of plans changing by professional circumstance and the creative process, but this is Zack cold not giving a shit.
Ritesh: I love Geoff Johns’ Signature Sign– Dropped Plot Points. Nothing is more defining than those.
Sean: Perhaps most telling is contrasting what’s not in the dark future that is in the final scene of Zack Snyder’s Justice League. While some elements are in here (Mera: The Road Warrior, Flash time travel, weird things happening to Cyborg) or have an element that replaces it (Deathstroke/Deadshot), there’s one element that doesn’t have an equivalent in the pitch, and that’s The Joker. In many regards the most interesting part of the drabbest scene in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Snyder’s Joker was extremely weird and off putting in ways that feel extremely cinematic. He was a figure who was never quite on the screen, always obfuscated and out of focus. He’s a trickster playing a gag on the Dark Knight, challenging his role as the hero of the story and not the man who fucked things for everyone.
In many regards, the future stuff is at its most interesting when it’s Zack Snyder’s unbridled vision of it.
Ritesh: This was evidently made in the late 2015 to 2016-ish period, I think? Am I wrong? So that JL could go to filming and then come out in 2017. And you can tell because Wonder Woman becoming The God Of War is presented as a horrific vision of terror here. That late 2015-2016 period/era was very much the Rebirth era, wherein Johns and Didio were calling and talking to Greg Rucka and being listen ‘Greg pls we swear we’ll be good to you this time, we’ve changed, we won’t abuse you or hurt you like before, we swear we’ll treat you nice and right’. And the run that would follow by Rucka would throw all that Brian Azzarello ‘God Of War’ business with Wonder Woman in the dustbin, and mostly ignoring all that Zeus stuff, not touching it. So that ‘man wouldn’t it be horrifying if Wonder Woman became the God Of War haha’ as a nightmare is very funny, and strikes me as quite Johns.
Sean: And yet, ‘Clark is dead, I have to be mean now’ feels very New 52 Superman, especially in Johns’ Justice League work. But it feels like it lacks the teeth of Snyder’s vision of a god smashing through the world. He’s, well, he’s too soft and cuddly. There’s nothing alien about a Clark-less Superman.
David: It’s like…there’s really not much to talk about with JL2 (besides the one VERY BIG IMPORTANT THING that obviously comes back around for us to talk about with 3) besides the sheer fact of Geoff’s involvement, because that’s not only the only real interesting thing about it, it’s basically the only thing about it period. It’s the sizzle reel Lexcorp footage sequence from BvS stretched out across 2 hours and then the story for the next movie starts.
Sean: In many regards, aside from the final scene, Justice League 2 is even more basic than either version of Justice League (or, perhaps more aptly, exactly as basic as the theatrical version of Justice League). There doesn’t appear to be anything tying it all together in a way that wouldn’t make the movie feel like a disjointed slog. Indeed, it feels like at least three characters would’ve gotten the shaft. I mean, the Flash’s subplot is basically the ending of his own movie. That doesn’t sound like it’d be fun.
We set up Justice League as being the film where all the characters come together to save the day and they’re nominally a team. So why aren’t they working together on something? Why is it just Lois and Bruce acting as the main pushers and shovers towards figuring out Lex’s evil scheme?
On that note…
Bruce Wayne: Lancelot!
David: The most important aspect clarified by the Excalibur watch, and also these storyboards prove that WB let him keep trying for it for at least one iteration past his initial Justice League plans prior to shooting it down for good. That this was removed is why Affleck conspicuously has so little to do in ZSJL relative to his peers, because struggling with being with the woman he loved or giving her back her own true love was supposed to be his big tragic arc, which continues here in revealing how she’s ‘the key’.
I respect the bugfuck audacity of it as a closed unit of storytelling. But also this fuckin’ sucks and fully turns Lois into a prop, up to and including Snyder mentioning in an interview that the reason Superman stops his rampage in ZSJL when he sees her isn’t because he recognizes her, but because he can see the child growing inside her. Batman even saves the day in the end of this because he learned the truth she hid from him, basically making the Knightmare her fault for lying!
Ritesh: Man these movies really fucking hate Lois huh. She’s just The Woman. The Love Interest. The Baby-Maker. She’s an object over which all the men angst over and get arcs off of. She exists to have nothing for herself. Why you would cast Amy goddamn Adams, one of the most talented actors on the planet, and then have her be reduced to doing this shit, I truly do not know. Like, do you not see or realize ‘Oh this sucks ass’ when you think of the prospect of handing her the script and telling her to play this shit? I gotta imagine it must be embarrassing even hypothetically. Where is the shame, my dudes, come on. How do you not see the blunder? It’s screaming at you in the face.
Wanting to do Excalibur fic is fine. But reducing Lois to The Pregnant Woman is just…whew. Come on, now.
Sean: To be fair, I’m pretty sure most Superman fiction have been unable to do anything remotely interesting with Lois. Maybe Lois and Clark, but even there the innovation was ‘What if we almost made Lynda Day, but missed the mark entirely.’
The choice to reduce Lois to the Pregnant/Fridged Woman highlights a trend that seemed to be going on at the time. This is basically how Injustice: Gods Among Us opens. Superman is tricked into killing his wife, leading him to begin a fascist dictatorship that Batman must stop. The main comics have several storylines where Lois dies horribly, resulting in Clark going apeshit. Even Grant Morrison has done this bullshit.
And Lois deserves more than this. She should be someone fascinating, but instead it’s this or vaguely gesturing at journalism without any real idea of how it actually works.
David: Neither shocked WB hasn’t reached out to Adams about coming back alongside Cavill, nor that she doesn’t seem to much give a shit. Even in the version of this Snyder ultimately had to come to where she’s having Clark’s kid, one of the rumors I’ve heard was that said kid was important because the Codex was passed down to him and is in fact the key to the Anti-Life Equation (actually kinda clever thematically if this is true given the way the Codex is established, and that along with tying this back to the beginning making it from Krypton to Earth is even kind of set up by the generation ship), so in that alleged version her being The Key isn’t even ‘just’ because of her as a thing men fight over, but literally because she’s the bearer of Superman’s child.
Ritesh: I want you to know my brain is screaming ‘Lore-Poison’ at the very thought of that, because my god. What is this baby-mama obsession. Like, okay, I can see the idea of ‘legacy’ and ‘tangible legacy’, from Batman’s end as a father figure who’s lost everything and everyone, including Robin, and from the Superman end of ‘And he raises his adopted son the way Pa did’. But again, you gotta be able to have the brain cells to really think about that for 5 seconds to realize ‘Oh we’ve just reduced one of the most compelling, iconic, memorable, and fierce and independent female characters of genre fiction down to a reactive baby-maker who men agonize over. Like come on, what is this shit, Snyder. This is ass, my guy.
David: I laughed about Cuck Kent with everyone else and even remember thinking in my full Snyder-hater mindset at the time ‘oh my god the weirdos are going to say this is the only possible appropriate ending for Superman because he becomes the adoptive Pa’, whereas in retrospect that’s probably the only good aspect to this thing. Snyder wants to do a superheroic Arthur/Guenevere/Lancelot where the sins can be forgiven and Camelot can rise again, but it’s just…well, lest we forget:
Sean: It looks like someone tried to do a Jonathan Hickman chart, but wasn’t horny for charts. Or anything other than classic Legion of Superheroes costumes.
Ritesh: I actually completely disagree here, Sean. I don’t think this is anything anywhere near Hickman or his Charts or any of that shit. No, this is something else entirely. This is a different beast and mode of galaxy-brain unhinged swinging.
I would argue this is much closer to Grant Morrison ‘McDonalds logo is a super-sigil’ type brain Invisibles bullshit juice applied to DC superheroes. It’s like an alternate universe brain-poisoned muscle-bro version of the Multiversity Map. This is loudly garish in a way I don’t associate with the Hickman mode of aestheticism.
Sean: The problem there is that… it’s not working as a logo for a corporation. It’s far too busy with meaningless jargon strewn about. If anything, it feels like a Ben Garrison political cartoon stripped of all images. I mean, who would use Betwixt and Between in this context. What do these things even mean?
With the McDonalds metaphor, there’s a Boom, there’s instant meaning to it. A sense that we have had the implications seared into our minds. This doesn’t have that. It’s too all over the place to have that.
Ritesh: Also the thing I want to note, and the problem of Snyder’s attempt at Excalibur fic. Guinevere cheats on Arthur in Excalibur. Here, Superman fucking died. Lois was in grief, Bruce was in grief. Anything she does is not a ‘sin’ or something to be ‘forgiven’ as it were. She would have done nothing wrong. Nothing was hidden. Again, it’s why I say, gee these films fucking hate Lois huh. It’s all such male-centric bullshit that reduces things down in the worst way. And it fails totally even as Excalibur fic.
Sean: If anything, it’s an indication with the largest failing of the ending of Snyder’s Justice League: It’s not horny enough. Horniness isn’t simply looking at hot, naked men and women. It’s something elicit and off-putting. Something that lurks beneath the surface of acceptability. Cheating is an extremely horny action in part because there’s a taboo involved. There’s a chance it could backfire spectacularly and horrifically (and, in the case of Excalibur, absolutely did). It could fail.
Here, we have two sad, lonely people trying to make a connection with anyone who would understand. It’s sweet, it’s nice, but it isn’t horny. Horniness is watching Robert Pattinson beat a random thug for 30 seconds, not Ben Afleck in Jersey Girl.
David: It’s the part where Snyder’s effort to do a ‘redemptive’ take on the Arthur myth craps out when faced with the moral rectitude of the cape crowd rather than powering on through. What you’re left with is empty gestures, a pissed-off fandom (which Snyder may not care about, but his bosses very much did in ways that reverberated directly back into the text), and an Amy Adams who’s right to probably be moving on to basically anything else.
Next is Zack back on his bullshit in a better sense with JL3 and the full return to Knightmare, an aesthetic mashup so blatant in its component parts he doesn’t even hesitate to say in the storyboards that the first half of the movie is just Fury Road (now that Darkseid has attained POWER OVER ALL LIVING LIFE) and the second half is just Lord of The Rings. I do not use ‘just’ to denigrate him here, that’s a hoot.
Ritesh: THE ENTIRE WORLD BECOMES A JUSTICE LEAGUE!!!
David: Which I actually dig not just as a JLA: World War III callback, but because in the Age of Heroes sequence in ZSJL it’s conspicuous that ‘Man’ doesn’t do anything in the fight in the same way as the gods, Lanterns, Atlanteans, and Amazons; here the world as we know it has a chance to stand its ground alongside its heroes. Albeit in the form of Superman leading every single army in the world, which is a pretty far cry from him downing a drone at the end of Man of Steel.
Sean: And, if I’m being honest, I think that might be the problem. Even without it being essentially a rough draft, there doesn’t feel like there’s a whole lot here. It feels extremely bare bones. Not simply in the sense of an outline, but rather in the sense of what might grow from it. There doesn’t seem to be anything here other than the most basic and obvious stuff. Sure, Bruce/Lois is surprising, but beyond that? There’s nothing here. It’s just a typical superhero movie that does typical superhero movie things.
The ending feels like the final fight of Endgame where everyone is coming out of the portals. And, watching it in 2022 as opposed to in the theaters in 2019 where it acted as the grand finale of the MCU, it’s extremely drab. I’m sure Snyder’s flare for style and action cinematography would’ve made the finale more epic and awesome, but there’s nothing here. It’s not that it lacks substance, it lacks style. With the one exception, none of this feels like it’s in Snyder’s wheelhouse. There’s nothing grotesque here in the way the Zombie Babies or all of Sucker Punch is. It’s just typical cape shit.
David: The big exception that I guess only came around in later drafts was the completely wild idea of Batman and Joker having a Last Supper on the eve of the final battle with the death of Robin being shown via shadowplay, but apparently he was gonna outsource Death of Robin to Scott Snyder as a tie-in comic by the time all was said and done, so who knows how he committed he was. You sort of have to imagine he would’ve filled the space allotted him here with similarly wild material, and done that big final super-brawl justice, but if you’re making the Endgame comparison, its time travel doesn’t wipe out chunks of its own entire movies just in time for the final battle. It feels inert and the joy of it mostly comes from ‘oh Zack would’ve gone completely sicko mode here huh’.
Ritesh: The ‘entire world becomes a Justice League’ is literally a ‘And then everyone clapped!!’ but as an actual superhero story. Like, we even have ‘And then Wonder Woman brings World Peace with her master negotiations’ and like, sure, Zack, I certainly could see Gal Gadot of the IDF could do that, uh huh. And then the Aquaman bit of ‘skepticism over his heritage is gone and replaced by admiration’ is like a hilarious ‘And then racism was defeated.’ It’s all hilarious. It’s comedy. It’s so ridiculous. How the hell do people accuse this guy of being a cynic? He’s just as much of a hopeful dope as anything Geoff claims to be. This is the height of absurd idealism and positivity. This guy believes. He believes in these American heroes. He’s bought in. He’s all-in.
David: That’s the thing, isn’t it? He wants to write the King Arthur story where King Arthur wins. I get now in a way I very much did not at the start of this why he could have in his most whacked-out dreams thought Superman needed a four to five-movie ‘arc’ to truly BECOME Superman and then the story immediately ends, because King Arthur only really becomes KING ARTHUR at the close of Excalibur. But then he dies because he can only embody the myth of himself for a moment. Zack wants Superman once he reaches the pinnacle to win clean, and at that point sure, why not end racism and war for desert while you’re there? For all the posturing that sends folks into hysterics, for all he wants to put them through the wringer first, Zack Snyder has absolute conviction in the power of the big good guy to rise above all.
Sean: Which might be the most American thing about Snyder and, indeed, superheroes in general. We want them to always win. There’s no room for tragedies, stories of broken horrible people doing their best in a cruel cosmos. There is a simplistic morality to these tales, a Golden Age vision of the world where the heroes always save the day and do the right thing. That any action of cruelty is caused by an outside force, be it the Anti-Life Equation or a Space Bug MORE POWERFUL THAN GOD!
It’s true of stories outside of Superheroes. Look at the number of action movies where a muscle machine man slaughters thousands of foreign baddies in the name of freedom. Or how message movies often end with the wronged party looking at his victimizer and deciding not to kill him because “That would make me as bad as you.” There’s the moralizing of horror films where having sex before marriage results in being murdered. It’s in every single Bill Murray movie that always ends with him becoming less of a sarcastic ass.
And while it’s true American cinema isn’t lacking for bastard protagonists, the desire is often preference towards cool ass heroes who save the day. Snyder isn’t the sort of filmmaker who would end his movie with his heroes overthrowing a cruel system with righteous fury or being forced to leave the ruins of their failures with, at best, a pat “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.”
Ritesh: In Snyder’s mind, to an extent, he’s ‘done’ the final battle of Excalibur in BvS’ ending, with Doomsday as Mordred, and the death of Superman/Arthur. And so this is his ‘what comes next’. This is what Boorman never gets around to, in Snyder’s head. This is Arthur returned from Avalon, at the moment his nation/world most needs him. And by the end, he doesn’t fall or fail, and neither do his knights, though they very much have that capacity in them. Instead, they overcome that and rise up and unite and restore the world. They save the world. It’s what superheroes do, isn’t it? Or so goes Snyder’s thought.
David: The good guys always win, even in the Snyderverse.
Sean: I suppose I am always going to be disappointed that we’re not getting the films all the fans claim Snyder’s to be. I want a movie that destroys the very concept of Superman from a political angle. I want things to go wrong, things to be horrible. Because then it’d be something different.
We live in an age where the vast majority of cinema allowed on most screens is dumb action movies where the morality is simple and the good guys are good and noble. They do the right thing and condemn those who don’t. They always act in the name of the world’s best interest. Which is to say America’s. I want something that counteracts that. Something that, if we must be trapped in this never ending sea of superhero fiction, approaches things from a different angle, has different assumptions about the world.
There were hints that things could go that way in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, what with Senator Finch’s sympathetic antagonism. But the large bulk of this outfit is nothing more than an embrace of American militarism (with Superman deferring to the US Military in Man of Steel and being the literal poster child for a recruitment campaign). It shines brightly in the sun without a thought as to whether or not the world is burning.
I guess what I wanted out of the Snyder films–which I think might have been too much to ask for in retrospect–was something along the lines of Elizabeth Sandifer’s redemptive reading of Man of Steel: A massive fuck you of a movie that pulls no punches about Superman being a conservative hero who will take us to the sun where we will be incinerated.
…I should get around to watching The Boys at some point, shouldn’t I.
Ritesh: Yes.
David: Past the storytelling question mark of Cyborg ‘regaining his humanity’ at the end, and the logistical question mark of Batman somehow beating this once again jobber-ass Darkseid, I don’t think we have much to discuss but the final flash-forward with - deepest imaginable sigh - Bruce Kent.
And this is maybe the one point where I’m still going to really allow myself to get lost in the nerd weeds, but I’m adamant: he shoulda been Nightwing. He’s Batman’s biological child raised by Superman! He’s the big ‘the best of the old giving rise to a new age’ symbol of a better world to come! The guy who kinda looks like Batman but is the more optimistic Superman-ey version of that is the obvious go-to, and I think you could’ve easily visualized it in a way where even people who didn’t know or care about the comics would’ve gotten it. Plus it represents a triumph of Batman’s one kid surpassing him after having failed his first. Speaking as someone who generally finds Nightwing a chump idea, it fits nice and cleanly and it’s how it should’ve ended rather than this big alleged Superman series ending on ‘well thank goodness, Batman’s back’. I guess the idea was ‘guy raised by a different couple who’s secretly Bruce’s biological kid becomes the new Batman without the same training’, so he’s…kind of Batman Beyond? After Epilogue? I guess? Look I know the answer is that Batman’s the coolest so it ends on him regardless of literally all other considerations but I just plain don’t like it. Harumph.
This is definitely how DiDio got the leverage to nearly do 5G though, right?
Ritesh: I think the key is even Zack Snyder knows and understands deep down in his bones that ‘Nightwing’ is frankly loser shit compared to ‘Batman.’
David: I know, I know. Just thematically more apropos. Or coulda come up with something else! Though ‘come up with something else’ is a rabbit hole with these movies that stretches to the core of the Earth.
Ritesh: Also the other big thing this whole super-epilogue reveals and unveils and what it says about the entire story and DC Film series of Snyder? I will quote our good friend and peer and fellow critic Corey Smith, a certified genius in my book, because he was entirely right and correct:
Batman and Superman in BvS should’ve fucked. Those homoerotic dudes should’ve fucked. Snyder wants Superbat-baby? Why involve Lois, you fucking coward? Why have em be in a triangle, Zack? Just let em fuck. Just let ‘em bone. It’d make everything so much better. You don’t even have to involve a woman to turn into a prop or an object. Just lean all into the male-centric shit. Superman raising his son with Batman is 100% a superior ending to this, I’m sorry.
Sean: Zack Snyder and Queerness is an essay that doesn’t have a happy ending. Or a happy middle. It’s not a happy essay at all.
Aside from that… Honestly, I just don’t care. I really don’t care about this aborted aftershow. It’s… What’s even here? It’s a goose egg. I know I opened this by saying we’re doing archeology, but there has to be a thing to pull from. Twilight of the Superheroes is the obvious comparison point. A massive, weird, horny Superhero comic that did unspeakable things to the fans’ ideas of Superheroes. One that does not exist, much like the final installment of The Smile of an Absent Cat or the final issue of JM DeMatteis’ Giant Sized Man-Thing.
But more than that, it’s approaching superheroes from an Arthurian lens. And we can see it throughout. Not simply by having two characters who shouldn’t bone… bone. But rather in the depth and complexity of the world. How the heroes have fallen because of their old age. How the quest for a better life isn’t always successful. But still, the quest must be made. How these strange stories collide together into an apocalypse of horror and beauty. Where the story continues ever onwards into new things, beyond what is known.
The pitch presented feels Arthurian. It feels like it’s working from the same logic. It allows them to win, but it also keeps the maggots in mind. It’s a superhero story that feels more at home with Paul Veerhoeven and John Boorman than Zack Snyder’s ever did.
Ritesh: I find it deeply fucking funny that Warner Brothers looked at Marvel Studios and the MCU and said ‘We want that, get us that cash money, dude’ and Zack Snyder’s plan for that involved casting an older Batman in his twilight years who in the end fucking dies at the very inception of the Justice League. And most funnily, leaves the DCU without a Batman for 20 goddamn years. No Batman in DC movies going forward. For 20 years. That is so fucking funny, my god. He took out the #1 money making machine for good, if this was to be a ‘universe’ as intended.
He wrote himself his own personal DCU Ending, like the ending of a big comics run or a Frank Miller Elseworlds, wherein the heroes fix/save everything and unite all, and there’s nothing more really to do. The studio asked him for a universe. He was like ‘lol lmao lmfao’, and delivered this. How can I not call this the funniest shit? He got what he wanted and made those suits pay for it, and he did it not only 3 times in 3 movies, but a 4th time around with The SnyderCut. He got em to give him over 70 million dollars for those reshoots, wherein he filmed that abominable Batman/LetoJoker scene with the ‘We live in a society’ meme, and Batman F-Bomb.
Please, this is the funniest fucking shit any director of this kind has done in the modern era. It’s so fucking hilarious.
David: All’s said and done, I not only respect but deeply understand and in many ways approve of what Snyder was trying to do with these movies in a way I never would have without this project, but his weaknesses beneath the received-wisdom hatred surrounding him are sharper than ever too. He really needs someone like Terrio to pull his sound and fury and fever-dream inspirations into a narrative that can carry the kind of weight he wants to foist on these characters; left entirely to his own devices or abetted by lesser talents like Johns and Goyer, that’s where he really lives up to his himbo reputation in a less flattering fashion. Still, for all that it can never go as far with the IP as it forces you to consider, I can’t help at this point but appreciate the final time we will ever see tentpole superhero blockbusters this off their shit.
But before we can go, there’s one final matter that must be discussed.
Remember there was another guy with a story credit way back in Zack Snyder’s Justice League? A Will Beale? Even though what we saw was entirely written by Terrio and Snyder?
Take a gander at this.
Ritesh: Hahahahahaha
Sean: Wow, this sucks.
David: You can PHYSICALLY FEEL Zack Snyder reading ‘Clark Wayne,’ flipping it to ‘Bruce Kent’ in his head, and that’s how all these movies happened.
Ritesh: What I have learnt from all of this is the fact that Zack Snyder actually, somehow, made the best Justice League movie possible given all this history, context, and circumstances at Warner Bros. It could all have been so, so much worse. What we got was pretty much the best outcome, all things considered.
David: “Somehow…it could all have been so, so much worse.” Engrave that on the ‘DC Extended Universe’’s tombstone.
Sean: In his novella, What We Can Know About Thunderman, Alan Moore describes the whole enterprise thusly:
“The basic incoherence of the comic book business is perfectly represented in the making of this movie.”
Which, if anything, is kinder than it really should be.
Ritesh: And now we live in a Post-Zack Snyder’s Justice League world, wherein that man is sure to never come back, but Cavill sure as hell is, because The Rock said something about the hierarchy of power. Gal Gadot is…Gal Gadot. Ezra Miller is a super-criminal. Ben Affleck was almost destroyed by the Batman role and made a whole movie about him dealing with how bad his life was by/after that point. Ray Fisher is barred given he spoke truth to power these past few years. So there you have it. The last remnants. Henry Cavill. Gal Gadot. Jason Mamoa. That is what remains of the Justice League and the house that Snyder built.
Where does it all go from here in this bold new James Gunn era? Hopefully somewhere surprising and interesting. But at the same time, whilst for a brief period these folks embraced the chaotic disconnection and disarray and individuality that so defines DC at its essence, David Zaslav the new Trumper-Chief of WB Discovery has demanded that DC be a super-connective universe and brand with a mega-story like the MCU. So what does that mean for Matt Reeves’ The Batman, the Suicide Squad, and all the other DC projects? Will it work? Or is it doomed?
Is DC in crisis? Or is the crisis over?
Sean: “Over”? Nothing’s over, Ritesh. Nothing’s ever over.
David: Zack Snyder thought he could end The DC Universe. Of course he failed in the end. Because if there’s one truth Superman and Batman prove: all about the branding, baby.
Especially, vigorously, this Batman.
Ritesh: In the end, when it comes to DC and crises…
