The idea of sitting through a four-hour movie is a daunting task no matter what it is, and there’s a reason why barely any theatrical releases run that long. Back in the day, intermissions used to be all the rage, allowing patrons to get a brief respite from the action to head to the bathroom or pick up some extra snacks, but it’s not been a feature of the industry for a long time now.
Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight did have a break in the middle of the roadshow version, but that’s more indicative of the filmmaker’s love of classic cinema than anything else. The rise of streaming services means that viewers can now simply pause whatever they’re watching so they don’t miss anything, but in the case of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, that might end up happening more than once.
The hotly anticipated redux of the DCEU blockbuster hits HBO Max in just a few weeks, but Snyder is still holding out hope that it’ll also get a theatrical release at some point in the future. And luckily for those who want to see his Justice League in all its glory on the biggest screen possible without missing a thing, the movie’s planned cinema bow will come with a ten-minute intermission.
“It’s four hours of picture and then the credits. I think it does go over four hours by a few minutes but that’s you know, because of the titles, because there’s a lot of people that worked on the movie. If ever the movie is ever to be viewed in the cinema, we have a ten-minute intermission which is built into the movie. It has like a beautiful suite of music, so that adds an extra ten minutes to the movie.”
An international theatrical rollout seems a likely option for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, given that HBO Max is only available in the United States, and Warner Bros. are kidding themselves if they’re not concerned about widespread piracy given the levels of hype and anticipation surrounding the project, but even domestic fans would be more than happy to head to their local multiplex to experience the comic book epic as it was originally intended.