As expected, San Diego Comic-Con 2022 is dropping a lot of news about what the future of DC and Marvel is going to be like. One of the biggest things thus far is Jim Lee, comic book artist and CCO of DC Comics, confirming that Zack Snyder is not returning to DC movies, nor is the “SnyderVerse” storyline going to continue, while speaking at SDCC.
This comes following the news from Rolling Stone about how the social media-feuled Justice League “Snyder Cut” campaign had a sizable amount of its activity driven by bots and fake accounts. This has, of course, been a whole issue because the reporting is very much framing Zack Snyder as a bad actor behind the campaign.
Two firms contacted by Rolling Stone that track the authenticity of social media campaigns, Q5id and Graphika, also spotted inauthentic activity coming from the SnyderVerse community. And yet another firm, Alethea Group, found that the forsnydercut.com domain — which claims to have made the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut hashtag go viral in May of 2018, and became the landing hub for efforts to bring Snyder back to the helm of the DC universe — was, at least at one point, registered to a person who also ran a now-defunct ad agency which promoted its ability to bring “cheap, instant Avatar traffic to your website.”
Rolling Stone spoke with more than 20 people involved with both the original Justice League and Snyder’s cut, most of whom believe that the director was working to manipulate the ongoing campaign. Snyder claims that, “if anyone” was pulling strings on the social media fervor, it was Warner Bros. “trying to leverage my fan base to bolster subscribers to their new streaming service.” But one source maintains, “Zack was like a Lex Luthor wreaking havoc.”
With all this, Warner Bros. is more likely than ever to feel comfortable creating distance between themselves and Snyder. Despite the better reception from critics, Zack Snyder’s Justice League ended up spending an additional $60 million on post production and editing costs for a film that was already not an important part of the DCEU anyway. That meant taking money away from other projects and resources. This did also highlight issues with Ray Fisher’s treatment and a lot of behind the scenes shadiness at Warner Bros. that was not good PR.
The future of the DCEU is a mess right now, and only time will tell what the full fallout of all of this will be. Right now, we do know that for now, the Snyderverse is over.
(featured image: Mike Coppola/Getty Images)
