In late 2017—months after the couple cut ties with the superhero epic amid an increasingly demoralizing battle with Warner Bros.—Deborah Snyder sat in a screening room on the studio lot alongside Christopher Nolan, one of the movie’s executive producers, as well as the director of the Dark Knight trilogy. She braced herself as the lights went down. “It was just…it’s a weird experience,” she says now. “I don’t know how many people have that experience. You’ve worked on something for a long time, and then you leave, and then you see what happened to it.”
After their private screening of the Whedon cut, Nolan and Deborah Snyder emerged into the light with a shared mission. “They came and they just said, ‘You can never see that movie,’” Zack Snyder says during lunch at his Pasadena office, a modernist series of cubes jutting from a hillside that overlooks the Rose Bowl.
“Because I knew it would break his heart,” his wife adds. That might seem overly dramatic. It’s just show business, after all. But the Snyders’ hearts had already been through a lot. The battle over Justice League was agonizing, but it wasn’t the worst thing to happen to their family that year. Not even close.
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Whedon rewrote and reshot about three quarters of Justice League, from what Snyder can gather. When fans ask him about details of the movie that bears his name, he usually has no idea what they are talking about.
Worst of all, for Warner Bros., Whedon didn’t exactly save the movie. “When we got to see what Joss actually did, it was stupefying,” says a studio executive, who requested anonymity. “The robber on the rooftop—so goofy and awful. The Russian family—so useless and pointless. Everyone knew it. It was so awkward because nobody wanted to admit what a piece of shit it was.”
The BvS extended edition had a more balanced narrative (Superman had more screentime) which imo helped the film.
Speaking of a, recent, too bloated film: IT Chapter Two comes to mind. I mean, the first film was pretty great. A good idea to focus fully on the past aspect of the story. The second half was structured like the entire book is actually structured (I read it in three or four weeks just before the first films release lol). While Muschietti still tackled the stuff that was left to tackle, it's a huge ass story I mean damn, but it became a situation of everything and the kitchen sink. Even
King himself was in it lol.
Either way, I think besides that the film was sinking under its own weight, it's a good example of the studio giving the filmmaker the room to make it that way after the first film proved to be such a hit. To me it felt like WB let Muschietti do his thing with the second film and hardly, if any, had any leverage on it.
I mean sure, those two films combined are like the most complete adaptation IT could possibly ever get, but the second film just isn't as narratively strong as the first. IMO Muschietti should've trimmed some here and there and really go for the adults' POV but that's me.
The comparison kind of make sense to some extent.
I agree with you about IT chapter two on how it had too much focus on the kids when it should’ve been mostly about the adults because we already had our time with them as kids. It was nice to see them again but it didn’t have to be that much.
Yeah, not having so much on the children in that film would've helped streamline the narrative of the adults. It's odd to say a specific number of minutes that could've stripped off of the film and make it 'better' but it just really was too much in total imo
Doesn't it seem like suddenly it's all Whedon's fault? I mean... I guess someone had to approve of Whedon's stuff, right? But now it's "that fucking Whedon guy screwed it all up", an WB are the good guys for letting Snyder release his cut.
Doesn't it seem like suddenly it's all Whedon's fault? I mean... I guess someone had to approve of Whedon's stuff, right? But now it's "that fucking Whedon guy screwed it all up", an WB are the good guys for letting Snyder release his cut.
‘Studio’s shouldn’t interfere with a director’s work.’
‘Why didn’t the studio interfere with the director’s work?’
‘Studio’s shouldn’t interfere with a director’s work.’
‘Why didn’t the studio interfere with the director’s work?’
It's more like: why does the studio let Whedon do whatever he was doing, but then decides to blame him single-handedly for this catastrophe?
Why wouldn’t they?
‘We wanted to respect his vision. It didn’t work with audiences. We’re trying something different,’ seems to be their message. Could they be more apologetic about hiring the guy? I suppose. But it’s okay to blame someone when they are actually at fault.
