Coming Soon.......The movie thread

Not being a DC guy at all, I have no clue what any of this is about

 

Was waiting for somebody to

 

Snyder’s viral campaign on his Vero account displaying his cut of Justice League.

 

In more detail, it's about the Justice League movie, its tortured path to the big screen, and what might have been.

Disney was on their way to making billions with their Marvel shared universe movies.

Warner Brothers wanted billions too beyond the Nolan Dark Knight trilogy. Unfortunately for them, hardly anyone attached to that trilogy wanted to keep it going despite.

Warner Brothers hired Zack Snyder to reboot Superman/create this shared universe. It was darker and grittier than earlier Superman movies and Marvel stuff because Zack Snyder and that worked for The Dark Knight trilogy.

Reviews were mixed on MoS, but it did well.

BvS happened. It started out rated R. WB wanted a PG movie, so it was edited a good bit. Reviews were terrible. MARTHA became a meme. Warners started getting worried.

Suicide Squad was released the same year. Allegedly, changes were made after reviews of BvS came in. It wound up being a mess critically speaking, but it made a lot of money and has a fairly huge DC cult-ish following (not related to the post in general, but James Gunn was contracted to do a sequel during his time in the penalty box with Marvel). The movie wasn't done by Snyder, but it was still started production in the grittier, less camp real-ish world that he had created for DC. If you've seen the movie, you know where it ended up. I don't know if you can describe it.

The R-rated BvS directors cut was released for home viewing before Suicide Squad hit theaters. Both were released in 2016, March and August, respectively. It was more coherent and better received critically. As big a fan of these movies as I am, I have only seen this cut maybe once. It's better, but I'd need to see it again to be fair with my own assessment. Most fanboys say it's a drastically better movie. The Snyder cut of BvS increases total run time for the film by 31 minutes, so yeah it's different. As far as the critical reception affecting Suicide Squad production meddling by the studio, take your pick as to whether it was too late to go back or WB didn't care or was dumb or whatever.

Wonder Woman happened. It was very popular with good reviews and not helmed by Snyder. It was a brighter movie and the most Marvelesque movie the DCEU had offered. Warner Brothers had a genuine win critically and at the box office.

Justice League started out with Snyder making a movie in the same style as BvS. There were conflicts between writers and rewriters early on. WB was displeased with the progress and was still unhappy with the reception of the theatrical version of BvS. About when WW was hitting theaters, principle photography been completed for Justice League, and the movie had moved on to post production. Also around this time, Zack Snyder left the movie following the death of his daughter. It's also been reported that WB fired him after seeing his cut of the movie. The actions they took following his departure indicate that they were at least glad he was gone. Here's where we get to the reasons for the big hubbub that's currently going on and the details on the film's production start getting murkier.

It had been rumored at that time that the Warners were wanting something more Marvelly which makes sense considering Marvel movies seemed to come with a guarantee of big box office numbers and great reviews. To complete post production, they hired Joss Whedon who everyone with an ounce of geek in them knows made the first two Avengers movies. There's no doubt changes were made to the movie. Some of these were Whedon changes, and some were changes the Warners mandated.

Music. Probably the least interesting detail on the surface, but if you want to change the tone of a film, the score is one of the best ways to do it. Hans Zimmer had done the music for BvS, but he stated that he was not interested in the genre and was never going to return for Justice League. Junkie XL, who had worked with Zimmer on BvS (and who is my current personal favorite composer for movie scores, responsible for the outstanding score for Mad Max: Fury Road) and had worked with Snyder previously on the 300 sequel was hired to compose the soundtrack. During post production, he was replaced with Danny Elfman. You know, the Simpson's theme guy. Of course he has done a lot more than that including Batman 89 and its first sequel at least as well as numerous other films, but he is known for more upbeat offerings to the point of being made fun of in Family Guy or another show (maybe it was even the Simpson's) that joked about how they had to fire a composer and bring in Danny making everything lighter and more comical in tone. Enough was done at that point that Junkie XL has at least a track or two on the soundtrack, so I really don't know how big a deal it was.

Run time. WB set a hard limit on run time at two hours, including credits, following the Snyder to Whedon change (or perhaps before when Snyder was fired, who knows?). Supposedly there were several hours of film in the rough cut, and the director's cut, the Snyder Cut that this is all about, ran three and a half hours. How much film exists is a big part of this. This alone tells you that the Snyder Cut is significantly different from the theatrical version. The 90 minutes of cuts include removing several characters entirely. Many of these were Easter eggs, brief appearances and such. Several main characters, or at least main characters in the universe had their roles in the movie reduced.

Rewrites and reshoots. There was enough of the story changed in post production that Whedon received a writing credit on the film. Everyone knows about digital shave that had to be given to Henry Cavill because he was already filming Mission Impossible: Fallout at the time. There were two months worth of reshoots during the summer before the movie was released. Videos and pictures are out there that show heavy digital editing to the original scenes for color and other details as well. Reportedly, jokes were added to Batman's dialog to lighten the tone. Many of the Superman scenes were reshot. Changes were also made to the plot in general. To give an idea, 80 pages of script were added and shot.

Put the reshoots and cut footage together, and you potentially have two very different movies. The cinematographer who was responsible for the principle photography claims that about 10% of the original film made it to theaters. Whether he means that 10% is of all film shot or that what was in theaters is 10% stuff shot by he and Snyder is up for debate, but if he's as emotional as he has claimed to be about it, it's likely that the fanboys are right and it's the latter. Snyder was also eying a three or more movie arc in a shared universe, so some of the filming may have been done with that in mind.

So why is this as big as it is?

Frustration. DC fans have had to sit and watch, or enjoy if you prefer, Marvel movies that are undeniably well done and almost universally better than most any DC offerings lacking Batman in the title. There's a good deal of pent up frustration.

History. WB has granted the fans things like this in the past. The BvS directors cut was released which wasn't as big a deal at the time as it has become. The differences have convinced enough fanboys that studio meddling killed an otherwise great movie. There's also some historical precedence with the release of the Donner Cut of Superman II. Donner was let go for various reasons during filming, and the director who replaced him made significant changes to the movie allegedly to ensure he got the director's credit for making the movie. This is a somewhat similar situation as far as how production went, and the result is two somewhat different movies. Perhaps when WB or whoever owns the property rights gets around to making another Justice League movie a quarter century from now, the Snyder Cut will be completed and released. The Donner Cut was released around the same time as Superman Returns, 26 years after Superman II was in theaters.

The twitterverse and other social media. Zack Snyder has been steadily beating the drum for his version of the film to be released. Over the past few months, Jason Momoa, Gal Gadot, Ray Fisher, and Ezra Miller have joined in. Henry Cavill has been more quiet. Others involved such as the cinematographer, Fabian Wagner (how I remembered that I'll never know. I looked up a little of this, but I recalled his name somehow) have also spoken up about the film either calling for its release or at least lamenting the changes made.


I just realized how long I have been writing this post. I also realize no one asked for this, and I think I may know how tenny must feel at times.

 

The “History Lesson”

All it needed was mother boxes

You forgot the bogus theory from the guy in Brazil.

 

Hey, you dropped a big rock of lady kryptonite.

 

Since I'm married, it's like I've been exposed to gold-k anyway.

 

Sounds terrible. Hopefully they never make another DC movie and donate all funds currently allocated for such projects to my next Wolverine film starring and directed by me.

 

Is it a porn film?

 

My claws will not be the only thing doing some penetrating if you smell what I’m cooking.

 

Words hurt

 

I want to see a wolverine film where it is just an actual wolverine having an adventure, Milo and Otis style. but like, dragging animals 3 times its size up trees and generally being the honey badger of the north.

 

I didn't go into as much detail as possible on the why the movie was crap because it wasn't relative to why people are interested in the director's cut. For example, I left out the part where executives insisted on the release date not moving despite all of the reshoots and heavy editing. The reason was it was during the AT&T purchase of WB, and studio executives were afraid of losing their bonus.

 

This time, the skelton gets infused with vibranium.

 

Homeboy CEO was banging girls he promised parts to ....... all sorts of lovelies

 

Its like NFL teams that have owners. Marvel has Disney who has hired a great GM and coach and has gone out and made negotiations to fill out the team to put a quality winning team on the field. DC has WB who insists on a specific direction for the team, gets impatient and wants results now, fires the GM coaches even though they're doing exactly what you hired them to do, and becomes involved in playcalling and player personnel decisions resulting in a sloppy mess of a team. Come to think of it, do the Haslams have their hand in motion pictures?

 

Dan Snyder and Paul Allen

 

I was trying to think of Dan Snyder.

 

“Joss, I love Henry’s Axis Chemicals Joker Face.” -Dan Snyder

 

I could have done without falling down this hole today. Now I'm back to wishing for the Final Crisis, Flashpoint mishmash that was to be.