synder's cut everything that we've wanted to watch
"Zack Snyder's Justice League" runs four hours and two minutes. That's 242 minutes. That's longer than "Avatar," "Avengers: Endgame," "The Irishman," "Dances with Wolves," "Malcolm X," "Lawrence of Arabia," or any of the "Godfather" movies. If it were released to big screens, it would tie Kenneth Branagh's 1996 adaptation of "Hamlet" for being the longest major studio theatrical release in history.
"Justice League" was meant to be the third in a series of Zack Snyder superhero films after "Man of Steel" and "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice," but Snyder and his chief collaborator and wife, executive producer Deborah Snyder, stepped down during postproduction to grieve for their daughter, who had died unexpectedly. The releasing studio, Warner Bros., was already pressuring the Snyders to add humor, following the relative box-office disappointment of the figuratively and literally funereal "Batman v. Superman," which ended with Superman's death. Joss Whedon (writer/director of the first two "Avengers" films) was brought in to take the project over the finish line, contain the running time to two hours, and make sure things were kept light. Whedon ended up rewriting and reshooting most of the movie, Whedon-izing it with deadpan quips and shooting new action scenes that, while competent, lacked the turbocharged delirium Snyder is known for. According to some behind-the-scenes accounts, less than 20% of what ended up in the final release was directed by Snyder.
The recut—it feels more correct to call it a "restoration"—contains zero Whedon footage. It's broken into seven chapters with titles, each of which has a serene self-contained quality, reminiscent of issues of a monthly comic (as well as old-fashioned episodic television; the Snyder Cut is as much of a medium-blurring, "Is it TV or is it a movie?" project as "Wanda Vision," "Small Axe," and season three of "Twin Peaks"). Only a sliver of what's onscreen is wholly new, notably a forward-looking "teaser" conversation between Batman and the Joker; but Snyder generated so much material originally—much of it shelved by Warner Bros. without being properly finished by visual effects artists—that the totality still feels like a new work.
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