The two projects couldn’t be any more different on paper, but that doesn’t mean you can’t draw similarities between Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Baz Luhrmann’s Faraway Downs.
Both came bearing the weight of hype and expectation, only to fall well short among both critics and audiences to underwhelm at the box office, be greeted with a shrug of apathy, and lose money before eventually being resurrected, re-cut, and re-released as the true product of their respective creator’s visions.
In the case of Justice League it took four years and four hours to realize Snyder’s intentions, but the road for Faraway Downs has been a lot lengthier than that. 15 years ago, Luhrmann’s Australia was pegged as a potential awards season contender, only for the $130 million epic to wind up with a disappointing 55 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, a tepid haul of $211 million from theaters, and a reputation for being an overblown, self-indulgent, and excessive blockbuster.
The filmmaker didn’t give up, though, and the lengthy 165-minute feature is now coming to streaming as a five-hour limited series with a brand new score and ending that lands on Disney Plus and Hulu on Nov. 26. If people didn’t care for it much as a nearly three-hour film, then the jury is out on whether or not it’ll be reappraised as a TV show nearly twice as long, but maybe it can channel the Snyder effect once again.
If it doesn’t, then it wouldn’t exactly be the first time Luhrmann’s indulgences have gotten the better of him.