It might have escaped your attention, but Zack Snyder’s Justice League is still dominating the cultural conversation over two weeks after it was first released onto HBO Max, a feat made all the more impressive by the fact that Godzilla vs. Kong dropped on Wednesday and has already secured a reputation as the most acclaimed installment in the MonsterVerse yet.
The director of the four-hour superhero epic has been a one-man marketing and publicity machine, showing up anywhere and everywhere to encourage fans to watch the Snyder Cut or stream it on repeat in an effort to restore the SnyderVerse. The latest tactic has seen him hop onto social media to exclusively debut an alternate version of Justice League‘s Knightmare epilogue, where Jared Leto’s Joker finally gets to tell Ben Affleck’s Batman that we live in a society.
It was the stinger at the end of the penultimate trailer for the film, albeit one that was nowhere to be found at all during the Snyder Cut’s 242 minutes. The director revealed that Leto improvised the line in the first place, and during his multiple takes of the exchange between the two iconic archenemies, it was decided that there was no room for the meme-baiting dialogue.
It’s now out in the open, though, as Justice League continues to be the most talked-about movie of the year, and it’s led to both increased calls and an uptick in speculation that it might not be game over for the SnyderVerse just yet, with discussions reportedly ongoing behind the scenes as AT&T, Warner Bros. and HBO Max try to come to some sort of agreement over how things proceed from here.