Ever since the theatrical release of Justice League fell well short of expectations, DC fans have been devoted to getting Warner Bros. to, as the hashtag puts it: #ReleaseTheSnyderCut – that’s the original version of movie from Zack Snyder before the studio enlisted Joss Whedon to reimagine the film with a lengthy bout of reshoots. There’s been a lot of mystery surrounding the campaign, though as of yet, we’ve never had it officially confirmed that a full Snyder cut even exists.
Until now, that is. The filmmaker recently hosted a Q&A in which he spilled the beans on everything fans wanted to know about his DC efforts. Including the fact that a cut of his vision for Justice League is out there. Snyder actually revealed that WB has several edits of the movie, but don’t badger him to see them, as the director says it’s all up to the studio what happens next.
“All I can say is… sure there’s a cut… it’s done. I have a cut. I have a bunch of them. So, it’s not like… that’s up to them (Warner Bros.)”
Intriguingly, one fan in attendance at the event claims that Snyder went on to hint that his JL came in at around 214 minutes – that’s 3 hours and 24 minutes, which beats Avengers: Endgame‘s confirmed 3 hour runtime. As we say, this intel comes from only one source but it does make sense, given the runtime of Batman V Superman. The Ultimate Edition of BvS was also 180 minutes long, though the theatrical cut trimmed the fat by half an hour.
We doubt that WB would ever have released a 3.5 hour Justice League in theaters, so perhaps, when things were going well between the director and the studio, the plan was to repeat BvS‘s tactic of a shortened cinema cut and then the full extended edition would be made available for fans on DVD/Blu-ray. However, once the relationship between the two parties turned sour, it seems WB lost interest in letting fans see what could have been. And what a shame that is.