“They didn’t want me to suggest more films to come. They wanted me to cul-de-sac it as much as I could,” Snyder told Vanity Fair. “I’m like, ‘Look, that’s just not the genre.’ It’s not the comic book genre to end the story, regardless if we ever make [another] one or not.”
Zack Snyder’s Justice League epilogue doesn’t just revisit that imagery, it expands on it and gives it new context. Now that we’ve seen the events from the end of the film unfold, we know what’s really happening. Just as he threatened after witnessing the defeat of Steppenwolf at the hands of the Justice League, Darkseid has brought his armada to invade Earth once again. And from the looks of things, he’s winning. In other words, the Justice League epilogue is like watching a scene from Justice League 2, a sequel that will probably never get made.
Here’s what it tells us…
Justice League 2 Story
As we can see, Darkseid and the armies of Apokolips have invaded the Earth. From the surviving team of heroes (and villains) working together, we can infer a few things, notably that Cyborg’s vision from the moment they resurrected Superman using the Mother Box has come to pass. Wonder Woman and Aquaman are dead, and Superman has turned evil, now being manipulated by Darkseid and the Anti-Life Equation after Batman failed to save Lois Lane’s life. Now, a new League consisting of Batman, Cyborg, Deathstroke, Flash, Mera, and the Joker are working to bring Darkseid down. If this sounds pretty out there, or like it has to be another dream sequence, keep in mind that it’s exactly the story that Snyder had intended to tell.
“It’s the fall of Earth, when Superman succumbs to anti-life,” Snyder told the New York Times in a recent interview. “And then sending Flash back in time to change one element so that doesn’t happen. And then the big battle where we beat him. When [the villain] Darkseid comes to Earth, in the movie that you’ll never see, the armies of Earth all unite again, as they did before.”
That Flash detail is key. You may note in the epilogue that Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) is wearing the same weirdly armored costume we saw him in when he appeared to Bruce Wayne in a seeming dream, shouting about Lois Lane and then wondering if he showed up “too soon.” Just as Barry learned he can manipulate spacetime using the Speed Force as they delivered Steppenwolf’s defeat, the dire circumstances we find Batman and friends in ultimately cause the team to send Barry back in time to “warn” Bruce so that he can be sure to save Lois’ life and thus prevent Superman’s turn to Anti-Life and Darkseid.
