Release the Snyder Cut is something that a certain pocket of the internet has been thirsting for, even though no such thing exists, and it would probably not help in correcting the course of the cinematic DC Extended Universe. Helping to fuel the fire once again is Justice League’s storyboard artist, Jay Oliva, who recently talked about a major difference in the film’s final act if Snyder’s original cut vision had been completed.
“I did from the time they arrived to the nuclear reactor all the way to the end of the fight,” Oliva said on the Comic Book Debate Podcast, as reported by ComicBook. “There’s a couple stuff that when I watched the film I was like, ‘Well, what happened to that?’ because I was really looking forward to seeing it because I’ve done some crazy stuff. I tried to top what I’ve done with Superman. When Superman comes back, I had done some really crazy stuff like Superman unhinged.”
Now, for those who saw the film that was actually released, while Superman does come back changed, he doesn’t go full Pet Semetary because Lois Lane comes in like a romantic deus ex machina to stop the violence as he’s about to find out just how much Batman would bleed.
An alternate sequence that goes fully into “Superman unhinged” could lend itself to the death of Batman, which was apparently part of Snyder’s original master plan by Snyder. He revealed that detail in a chat on Vero, when a fan asked if the story arc would have ended with a dead Batman. Snyder responded, “Of course,” alluding to Final Crisis, where Superman holds Batman’s lifeless body.
I mean, even as someone who doesn’t really care about Batman like that, I must say that sounds like a real downer ending for the series. Especially when one of the major complaints of the DCEU is that it’s too dark, killing off Bruce Wayne, especially if it was Superman doing the killing, would just seem like an even bigger misfire than the mess that was BvS.
As much as Justice League didn’t fix things and wasn’t that much better, it was still at least tonally moving in a better direction. I appreciated that it seemed to have a real love for the original comics and didn’t feel like tearing everything down was an improvement (except for pretty much everything Wonder Woman-related, because of course, he made Diana “the mom,” had upskirt shots, and had her fall for the bat who negs).
All this proves to me is that Snyder’s vision for the DCEU, while 100% his own, does not work. I’m not saying that Whedon’s is better, because we will never be able to fully compare the two, but I have my doubts that, if we actually saw his version of JL, the same people wouldn’t be longing for a Whedon cut. What we do have is trash, and what we should focus on is moving forward.
Like the 2016 election, it’s time to stop looking backwards and move forward.
(via ComicBook, image: Warner Bros.)
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