Justice League: What’s at Stake

For us? 

Nothing.  

In the best of Generation-X tradition, we get to sit back and watch the world burn.  But there are some things at stake here.

The Snyder Cut comes out tomorrow and it’s no secret that the current Warner Brothers leadership wants it to fail.  They are pissed at their bosses at AT&T. Efforts to sabotage the Snyder Cut are more obvious than Kathleen Kennedy’s attempts to kneecap The Mandalorian. The Snyder Cut is already out on high seas, and that data is very controlled.  It’s a perfect copy and it does not have a reviewer-copy water mark.  It’s a high-level leak, only a few people would have had access to that data.  There have been hostile stories in the Hollywood Reporter and Deadline. And Hamada sat down for what was obviously a commissioned interview in which he indicated that the Justice League’s official Batman wasn’t Ben Affleck but Michael Keaton. (?!?!)

The guys that okayed Snyder’s films were executed after the failure of Batman V Superman.  Justice League was already in production, but the new team wanted to be rid of Zach Snyder.  When his daughter committed suicide, he was compassionately shitcanned and Joss Whedon was brought in to finish his movie as cheaply as possible.

Hamada and company had nothing to do with the first Wonder Woman or Aquaman.  They did green-light Shazam and The Joker.  However, they also greenlit Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman 1984.  Those are both more recent and more spectacular failures.

A successful Snyder Cut will mean their judgement was…flawed.  

More interestingly, it will also reflect the entire studio project development system.  When a project is greenlit and goes into development there may come a point where everyone involved knows they are going down the wrong road.  They will either kill the project or change things drastically.

But they NEVER go back to the original concept.

No one has ever done this before.  

And it took the outsiders at AT&T to make it happen.  People who are invested in a bad system are still invested in it and will defend it just because that is the way it’s always been done.

Hamada and company have the simpler problem of knowing they will be fired if this blows the doors off.

I’ll try to have a review of the Snyder Cut up by close of business tomorrow.