Even the most ardent of supporters are surely coming to terms with the fact that the SnyderVerse is dead in the water for the foreseeable future, despite how hard the various online campaigns tried to convince Warner Bros. otherwise. It might be the end of an era, but Zack Snyder’s Justice League was hardly a bad way to end things.
Unsurprisingly, it boasts the highest audience score out of any DCEU installment on Rotten Tomatoes, and spent weeks at the very forefront of the pop culture conversation as fans dissected and analyzed every frame of the filmmaker’s four-hour epic. It was fan service writ on the largest possible scale, and that was never more clear than in the epilogue.
Not only did it give audiences the face-to-face between Ben Affleck’s Batman and Jared Leto’s very much new and improved Joker they’d been desperate to see, but their intense exchange was one of the best scenes in the entire movie. Sadly, it revealed that Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn had died somewhere between the events of Suicide Squad and the Knightmare timeline, and in a new interview the actress addressed her offscreen fate.
“I guess it’s kind of like the comics. The film version of the DC universe, I actually think they’re a lot like the comics. You pick up one comic and something’s happening and then you pick up the next comic and maybe that character’s not alive, maybe that character’s not with that person, maybe that character looks completely different. Each movie is its own sort of thing, and I think that works in the comic book world, and I think that works in the DC film world as well. It’s not like Marvel where everything is more obviously linked in a more linear way. It feels like there’s so many adjacent stories, worlds, and films happening at the same time, just like there are in the comics.
So, yeah, I didn’t know that, but it doesn’t necessarily change what other people are able to do with this universe, I don’t think. What one director decides I don’t think dictates what another director might be able to pick up and do with the world and the characters, which is fun. I think that’s an appealing aspect for directors in the DC world, they can make it their own, the way James Gunn did. He didn’t have to be beholden to the version that David Ayer set up. He could pick it up and make it his own, which I’m sure was more appealing for him.”
Technically, Zack Snyder’s Justice League isn’t regarded as official canon by the studio despite fans saying otherwise, so Harley can stick around for as many Suicide Squad sequels as we end up getting without impacting the Snyder Cut’s epilogue. At one stage, Robbie and Leto were even set to team up for their own blackly comedic crime caper before the DCEU course corrected for the umpteenth time, but if the SnyderVerse were to be restored eventually then she could yet end up going out in a blaze of suitably mischievous glory.