If you are someone who watched the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League earlier this year, you have probably heard about #RestoreTheSnyderVerse.
But what is this movement? Why did it get popular and is it still a thing or has it faded into oblivion?
Read on to find out all you need to know about #RestoreTheSnyderVerse.
#RestoreTheSnyderVerse?
The release of The Justice League movie and in fact its production was plagued by complications, frustrations, and terrible communication between Warner Bros and the director they had hired to build the DCEU.
Initially, with 2016s Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, Zack Snyder started to see the meddling hand of WB as they made extensive alterations to the film removing 30 minutes due to the dark and intense nature of the film in an attempt to make things lighter.
Unfortunately, those 30 minutes massively impacted the storyline and saw BVS receive terrible reviews. When the DVD release featured the restoration of these deleted scenes, fans and critics alike were incredibly supportive and expressed how much this version should have been what made it into cinemas.
WB didn’t learn their lesson though…
Instead of allowing Snyder the creative control a director should possess, they lost confidence completely and replaced Snyder with Joss Whedon, the man behind the original Avengers movie.
At this point, it was extremely apparent that WB did not want to build a DCEU which would be true to DC comics, and the fans with a darker tone and higher stakes, they wanted another MCU. Light, happy, and absolute cash cows. (By the way, I love the MCU, but both DC and Marvel have their strengths and it would be great to see their stories really shine.)
The shake-up on the set of the Justice League was not what fans wanted and it resulted in a lackluster movie with awkward jokes, pacing, a terrible villain and it looked like the DCEU was about to go extinct as a multi-film universe.
But then enter the fans!
Fans believed in Snyder and his creative vision and they were desperate to see the film he created instead of the hot mess that was greenlit for theatres by the WB execs.
Early 2021, a petition was created on Change.org for fans to get the Snyder verse restored. Now this petition hasn’t had viral success, but treated like a marathon and not a sprint, it’s still getting new signatures to this day.
At the time of writing, this petition has 71,136 signatures of its 75,000 goal!
And then in March, we finally got to see the Snyder Cut, a 4-hour epic that was completely different from the Whedon version. It was a coherent, well-paced, and impressively balanced film, albeit, you needed half the day to watch it.
Alternatively, with the film neatly segmented into roughly 40-minute parts, you could treat it like a mini-series and watch it at your own pace, but this movie was truly night and day different from the one we saw in 2017.
Is The Movement Dead?
The answer to this is a little more difficult to nail down, but it doesn’t look like hope is completely lost just yet.
With the recent release of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, attention has again been turned to WB’s meddling nature as some fans cry out to see a David Ayer cut of the 2016 film.
A new hashtag, #ReleaseTheAyerCut is making the rounds and David Ayer has definitely hyped up his audience by releasing information about his vision.
Seeing the fans responding so strongly could be playing on the execs over at WB’s minds and as they enter into a new partnership with Discovery, we can expect some things to be shaken up.
There are several more DCEU movies slated for release in the next few years with a Shazaam sequel, Black Adam, the new Batman film, and more, so we will be keeping a close eye on how the studio responds to the ongoing calls from fans, and whether they simply ignore it altogether.
What is your opinion? Do you think it’s time to let the DCEU die and simply have great independent films such as The Joker with very little connection to the other films, or do you still want to see the DC universe come together on the big screen?
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Ben Gibbons