Yes, more about the Snyder Cut.

One thing I’ve seen people say online is that the Snyder cut of Justice League is sort of like DC Comics’ Lord of the Rings. I understand perfectly well that they mean in terms of scope, epicness, and world-building, but the comparison really took me aback when I stopped and thought about it.

Why? Because Lord of the Rings‘ movie adaptations are actually sort of the opposite of how Justice League was handled. Consider the directors. Peter Jackson was a cult director when he was given the reins of a movie trilogy to rival, or even surpass, the original Star Wars trilogy – clearly talented and capable, but not a megastar. Zack Snyder, on the other hand, has given us several blockbuster movies with varying degrees of success.

Yet the movies were handled in opposite ways by the studios. Imagine if Peter Jackson had filmed the entire extended-edition Lord of the Rings movies, all three at the same time, an epic undertaking intended to give us a great and massive story. Then the movie Dungeons and Dragons flops at the box office, and New Line wets their pants.

Instead of making sure that the best possible movie is released, they take the first opportunity to replace Jackson with another director, popular but overrated, and not really capable of giving the movie the gravitas it needs. They also want the movie to be funnier, as well as only two movies instead of three.

And that new director – let’s call him Moss – takes a movie trilogy that is all but finished, rips it to shreds, and reshoots most of the scenes, making everything less epic, impressive and important, and adding in “funny” dialogue. Many side-characters are carved out completely (an awful lot of them non-white people, it’s worth noting), and main characters have their stories carved down to the bone until almost nothing is left. Oh, and a lot of that pesky world-building gets stripped as well. It’ll scare the normies. Plus, make sure the whole story fits neatly into two standard-length movies, and just keep trimming until it does.

Can you imagine the trash-fire that the Lord of the Rings would have been if New Line had treated those movies the way WB treated Justice League? It would have been a disaster financially, fans would have hated them, and non-fans probably would have been underwhelmed. We would likely have never gotten the extended editions, and seen the director’s adaptation as it was originally intended.