A Major Change Is Coming To The Snyder Cut Of Justice League
The final fight with Steppenwolf (Ciaran Hinds) is going to look different in Zack Snyder's Justice League.
Now more than ever, Snyder has been fielding questions from fans on Vero about the upcoming director's cut of the 2017 superhero team-up. In response to a query as to whether he will "change the color grading red sky we saw in Josstice League" — the theatrical version of Justice League completed by Joss Whedon – Snyder simply answered, "Yes."
As a brief refresher, Avengers director Joss Whedon was brought in to finish Justice League when Snyder departed mid-production due to a family tragedy. At the apparent direction of studio Warner Bros., Whedon basically pounded and shaped Justice League into a completely different movie — throwing huge chunks of story out the window, writing 80 new pages of screenplay, and reshooting (by some estimates) up to 90 percent of the film.
The Frankenstein's monster of a result landed in theaters with a dull thud, grossing less than any other DC Extended Universe picture at the time and leading immediately to intense speculation as to whether Snyder's original vision would have fared any better with audiences. That speculation will soon come to an end, as Warner Bros. is inexplicably ponying up at least $30 million (and perhaps much more) to enable Snyder to complete his director's cut of Justice League, which will drop sometime in 2021 on the newly-minted streamer HBO Max.
Snyder will oversee a reworking of the score, record new dialogue with the original cast, and preside over the completion of VFX work — which evidently includes a major tweak to the aggressive color grading in the film's final act.
Why is Zack Snyder making this change to Justice League?
It's a pretty safe bet that the skies going red during the final fight in Justice League wasn't a choice Snyder ever made. When the very first trailer for Justice League premiered at Comic-Con in 2016 — well before Snyder left the production — the brief scenes from the climactic battle featured skies of deep blue, making clear that it took place at night. Fans on Vero noted that this also made for a cool contrast with Steppenwolf's Parademons and their fiery blasts, which are blazing red.
In the theatrical cut, everything — everything — in that final scene is bathed in a blood red hue, which makes everything just sort of blend together on screen. Restoring the original color grading will give a massively different look to the fight against Steppenwolf — and the change will likely also make it easier to tell, you know, what's actually happening.
That's not the only alteration Whedon apparently made that Snyder is reversing. Snyder has said that the whole subplot involving the Russian family the Flash (Ezra Miller) saves during the final fight won't show up at all in his version of the film. The way in which Steppenwolf in ultimately defeated — Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) destroys his axe, causing the fear-sensing Parademons to turn on him — is likely to also be changed in favor of a much more shocking fate for the Big Bad.
We'll probably be getting about a billion more tiny tidbits of information between now and the time Zack Snyder's Justice League finally premieres sometime next year, and it'll be interesting to see how it all adds up in terms of the finished product, which is said to potentially be twice as long as Whedon's two-hour cut. Of course, we'll be keeping our eyes peeled for any new information to report, and we'll keep you up to speed.