While we may never see the much-hyped Snyder Cut of Justice League, the director has spent pretty much the entire time since its release giving us morsels of information as to how his version of the film would have looked, spotlighting the key differences from the butchered cinematic cut and his future plans for the DCEU.
Today’s treat is a never before seen storyboard for the scene within the Batcave where the League discuss the Motherbox. As Snyder explains, he wanted to keep the camera consistently moving throughout the scene, so he designed a custom-built eight-camera rig that’d have let him achieve what he wanted.
I’m no expert in this kind of technology, but my understanding is that this would have allowed Snyder to digitally compile a constant revolving shot in the finished movie, showing each hero’s reaction to the Apokalyptian technology and how they interact with each other when discussing it. It’s a neat idea to give an expository scene a bit of energy, and a technical cut above what you’d expect from your average superhero movie.
Sadly, the cinematic cut seems to have completely reshot this scene and done it in a far more conventional manner, with a three camera set-up. Given how dreadfully Justice League did considering that it brought together some of the most historically profitable superheroes in cinema history, you might wonder whether the Warner Bros. executives that signed off on giving Snyder the boot regretted it when they saw critics and audiences alike tear it apart.
Who knows, maybe one day we’ll finally see what Snyder would have cooked up? All this footage is presumably in storage somewhere at Warner Bros. and maybe in a few years, there’ll be sufficient interest to pour some money into reassembling Snyder’s original vision for the film and seeing how it compares. Because while the finished product probably won’t be a Best Picture contender, it’s got to be better than what we got last year, right?