By Zack Snyder
I’m what you might call a renaissance man. I love comics and movies, so much so that I insist on drawing the entire third act of all of my comic films digitally in post. Good comic book films are good, but nothing compares to watching a bad comic book movie (Justice League!) that’s been sentenced to be recut by the same guy (me!), over and over again, for the next century.
I know what you’re thinking. “Zack, the first cut was bad. Why should we give you more money to fix his bad product when you wasted the first hundreds of millions of dollars you were given to make it good the first time?” First of all, Joss Whedon ruined it, and at this point I think we can all agree he’s objectively a tool. And secondly, it’s called potential. Sometimes a director is just a 54-year-old kid trying to make it in the industry with nothing but a dream and a personal net worth of 60 million dollars. And isn’t cinema about taking a chance on art, even if the artist has time and time again proven himself to be middling at best?
And I know: we could make a lot of new, good comic book movies with all of that money spent on reshoots – potentially with underrepresented people at the helm! Hell, some wild and crazy guy might even take that money and make a movie that’s not even based on a comic! But how will those people learn how to make a movie if they’re not forced to watch my one bad movie go through years of incremental reworks, re-releases, and director’s cuts? They say you learn how to make a movie while you’re on set, and when you can’t be on set, paying for the privilege of watching me rework my grimdark CGI superhero cuddle puddle in real time is almost as valuable. I brought you neck-snapping Superman, Doctor Manhattan’s huge blue hog, and *THE* Owls of Ga’Hoole. That’s called experience, sweetie. Take notes.
You can’t deny that people love how much they learn from Director’s cuts. Without George Lucas’s Star Wars recuts, we never would have seen Jabba the Hutt, but smoother. When Stanley Kubrick took the last 2 minutes off of The Shining, he gave movie-goers what they love most: an ambiguous ending. And don’t even get me started on Ridley Scott’s recut of Blade Runner – without Ridley’s tireless work, we’d never known what it would be like to have a movie with so many recuts and rereleases that the layman would have no idea which version to watch without googling it first.
And who knows what new truths each recut will unveil about the beloved DC universe! Remember how we had to colour out Henry Cavill’s moustache in some scenes? Fuck it, it’s back in cut number 4. By cut 14, Jared Leto’s Joker is in it baby, and you know he’s getting crushed by Batman’s mom’s piano. I might fuck around and digitally replace Jason Momoa with a pile of snakes in cut 27. And by cut 32 I guarantee all of you will finally join me on Vero, the world’s best social media platform of which I am the sole user.
So why don’t you lighten up for a minute, toots? Cinema isn’t gonna die simply because studios have decided to stop paying for good movies. We’re gonna be just fine. Plus I hear this new one will be 4 hours long! Can I get a Boo Yeah for that?
