Zack Snyder finally gets to draw a line under his decade-long association with the DCEU when Justice League arrives on HBO Max two weeks from tomorrow, but it’s still going to be a bittersweet experience for the filmmaker.
While he might have gotten the unprecedented opportunity to return to the project three years after it was first released into theaters and essentially remake the entire movie in his own image, Snyder has never been shy in admitting that he’d planned at least one more outing for the titular team. His five-film arc that began with Man of Steel was supposed to conclude with a third Justice League blockbuster, and Part II even had a release date once upon a time, but now we get two versions of the same film instead.
In a new interview, Snyder admitted that his intentions were for Justice League to launch an entire trilogy that sounds like it would have been epic in scale and spectacle, given that he’s compared what he had in his head to Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, although he’s clearly resigned himself to the fact that it’ll never happen.
“For me, there’s a trilogy of films that I sort of lean on. Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and Justice League are a continuity, and within that three-movie arc there is a consistent tone. Frankly, Justice League was meant as the primer for another two movies, not that those movies are ever going to get photographed, I don’t see that happening, and it stays true to that concept. It was meant to be like Lord of the Rings and not a one-off. That’s the way I think about it.”
If Zack Snyder’s Justice League runs for four hours and was only meant to be the first part of a trilogy, who knows how long the closing chapter would have been, given that the opener has a runtime almost as long as The Return of the King‘s Extended Edition. As much as the fans would love to see him return to the DCEU well again, it looks very unlikely at this stage, but the fact that the Snyder Cut even exists at all shows that they’ve already accomplished a great deal.