Zack Snyder doesn’t expect he’ll ever get to finish his planned trilogy for “Justice League” but he reveals what he had in mind for those movies…
Zack Snyder is feeling the love lately after his four-hour cut of “Justice League” has received a positive reception following an outcry of support to see his vision of the film finally realized.
A family tragedy forced Snyder to drop off the project during filming and the two-hour version that landed in theaters from Joss Whedon was ultimately filled with reshoots and a reworked story. That version of “Justice League” was largely panned by critics and audiences alike with the movie dying a rather quick death at the box office.
Immediately after that film was considered a failure, there was an immediate buzz from fans to let Snyder finish his version of the movie and eventually Warner Bros. agreed to let him do it. The final release titled “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” landed on HBO Max on March 18 and the reception has been overwhelming.
While the Extended DC Universe has largely moved on with a full slate of movies already in the works, there has been a lot of support lately for Snyder to actually return and finish his planned “Justice League” trilogy. It seems unlikely that will ever happen — but then again no one truly believed Snyder would get the chance to release his four-hour version of “Justice League” either.
With that said, Snyder recently revealed what the next two films in the “Justice League” series would have contained, which would have completed his epic trilogy.
“If you go to Dallas, and you go to the AT&T exhibit, it has the entire 40 foot dry-erase board that has a very detailed outline of the next two movies,” Snyder revealed when speaking to Variety.
“It was basically the fall of Earth to Darkseid, and then, in the post-apocalyptic world, Flash and Cyborg and Bruce figure out a way to jump Flash back in time to prevent Lois’ death so Superman doesn’t succumb to anti-life. Then the third movie was the uniting of all the forces of Earth to defeat Darkseid. It was a giant, “Lord of the Rings”-style battle movie.”
For those who have already seen the Snyder Cut — his big bad Darkseid gets very excited when his acolyte Steppenwolf tells him that the anti-life equation exists on Earth and he suddenly wants it very badly. What is the anti-life equation exactly?
Well the definition has changed over the years but essentially in DC mythology, the anti-life equation is “a transcendental mathematical formula originally said to allow those who knew it to dominate the will of any sentient race.” In some versions, the anti-life equation even allows the user to bring the dead back to life.
That would explain how Superman would come under Darkseid’s control, which speaks to the epilogue in “Justice League” when Batman dreams of a dystopian world of the future where he’s forced to team up with both Deathstroke and the Joker.
As much as Snyder has planned, it doesn’t appear he expects to ever get the chance to finish those films, although he certainly appreciates the support for the fans that want to see it.
“Yeah, I’m not sure that’s a thing. I think it’s amazing and I love the fans and I love that enthusiasm,” Snyder said. “Like I said before, the truth is, in retrospect, it’s more likely that they would have made a sequel [to “Justice League”] than going back and redoing a movie that had already been released.
“But I just think that like this was a Herculean effort for all of us, and Warner Bros., they have their big plan for the DCU, even to the point where they told me — and I’m fine with it — that the theatrical cut of “Justice League” is what they consider canon for their universe. So I’m just like, you know, this little Elseworld experiment. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to finish the movie. But, yeah, I don’t know if there’s anything else in the future.”
For now, Snyder is focused on his next film coming out later this year — “Army of the Dead” — which focuses on a heist taking place in the middle of the zombie apocalypse. That film will debut on Netflix in May.
