Zack Snyder, the director of Justice League, has never seen Justice League. His name is in the credits as the film-maker, but he’s never sat through the version released to the world more than three years ago. His wife, Deborah, who produced the movie, advised him not to.
In late 2017 – months after the couple cut ties with the superhero epic amid an increasingly demoralising battle with Warner Bros – Deborah Snyder sat in a screening room on the studio lot alongside Christopher Nolan, one of the movie’s executive producers, as well as the director of The Dark Knight trilogy. She braced herself as the lights went down. “It was just… It’s a weird experience,” she says now. “I don’t know how many people have that experience. You’ve worked on something for a long time, and then you leave, and then you see what happened to it.”
What happened to Justice League was a crisis of infinite doubt: A team of executives who lost faith in the architect of their faltering comic book movie empire, and a director in the midst of a family tragedy that sapped him of the will to fight. Joss Whedon, a director from another universe, the Marvel Cinematic one, left The Avengers after two movies and crossed over to comics rival DC, picking up Justice League not where Snyder left off, but remaking it significantly with extensive rewrites and hurried reshoots, just as the studio demanded.
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