Warner Bros changed the idea for the film after the lukewarm critical reaction to ‘Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice’
Zack Snyder has shared his original plans for Justice League.
The director took the helm of the DC Comics movie, which saw Batman (played by Ben Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), Cyborg (Ray Fisher), and The Flash (Ezra Miller) join forces to save the planet. Joss Whedon took over at the post-production stage due to the death of Snyder’s daughter.
In a live Q&A, Snyder was asked by a fan, “What the hell happened?” With the superhero team-up movie and the future of the DC Extended Universe that had been planned out with Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice.
“That’s a good question,” the director replied, explaining that the “vocal minority” of viewers hadn’t liked Batman v Superman, which caused Warner Bros to change the direction of Justice League.
“The original Justice League that Chris [Terrio] and I wrote, we didn’t even shoot,” Snyder said. “The actual idea – the hard, hard idea, the scary idea – we never filmed because the studio was like ‘That’s crazy.’”
He continued: “It’s a long story. The truth is that, the Knightmare sequence in this movie was always my idea that all of that would eventually be explained … and that we would end up in the distance future, where Darkseid has taken over Earth and where Superman has succumbed to the Anti-Life [Equation].
“There was a few members of the Justice League that had survived in that world, that they were fighting. Batman broke a pact with Cyborg because something happened… They were working on an equation to jump Flash back to tell Bruce.”
Snyder added that while the studio were fine with the overall story, they were not happy with “the details of how and why” the Justice League split apart, causing them to be changed.
Like Batman v Superman, Justice League was also not received warmly by critics. In a two-star review, NME said: “This should have been superhero team-up to end them all, a massive celebration of comic books’ greatest. Instead it is almost apologetic, a will-this-do? stab at just getting them all on screen together, without giving them much to do. As much as we may all be fatigued by superhero reboots, it really might be time to write this one off and start again.”
