More Batman and Superman talk has happened in the past few days in the wake of ‘Justice Con’ among other things.
First up, filmmaker Zack Snyder has revealed that he’s not getting paid for his ‘Snyder Cut’ version of 2017’s “Justice League”. Though the project has tens of millions going into it, Snyder revealed at the fan-established Justice Con that though he’s working on the film every day, he sees this as completing his cut:
“It’s exciting to get this chance and I wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth and I love working on it and I’d do it for free – and I am.”
That film will be released on HBO Max sometime in 2021. It marks the culimination of the ‘Snyder-verse’ of films that began with 2013’s “Man of Steel” – a film that had its own controversies including the infamous ending where Henry Cavill’s Superman stops the villain General Zod (Michael Shannon) from slaughtering innocent people by snapping his neck and killing him.
David Goyer, who co-wrote both it and 2005’s “Batman Begins,” discussed that ending at length this weekend during a Comic-Con@Home panel. He tells Collider:
“We were trying to – if you track the story all the way through in terms of this character emerging and his maturity and fully understanding the kind of power he has, and when they fight the kind of devastation that is caused by it. It’s not some frivolous fight, it’s almost like 9/11 when they fight.
We were trying to come up with a stalemate where he couldn’t – there’d been a [comics] editorial decision in which Superman doesn’t kill, it was a rule, but that’s a rule that’s imposed on a fictional world and we just thought but sometimes, whether it’s a soldier or people in law enforcement, and again an immature Superman.
This is the first time he’s ever flown in that story. He’d just flown for the first time days before that. He’s not aware of the extent of his powers at all. He’s finding somebody who’s said, ‘I won’t stop,’ who’s said, ‘You can’t put me in a prison I won’t ever stop’. We wanted to put him in a stalemate
I absolutely understand a lot of people had problems with it. When I have had a hand in adapting these things, you wanna be as respectful to the core material as possible but you also can’t protect against failure. You have to take big swings. With big swings there are big rewards.
We took enormous swings with Batman Begins and with The Dark Knight that turned out to be well-received, but we were trying to tell a different kind of Superman story, a Superman story that hadn’t been told before and it required us taking some big swings. We talked about it. We talked about whether or not people would accept it, and the editorial staff at DC had accepted it.
It doesn’t mean it wasn’t a mistake, but if you sit there and you say, ‘I don’t wanna take any risk. I’m worried I might offend a portion of the audience,’ I don’t think that’s a particularly healthy way to try to make a film or a television show.”
He adds that there was a scene they wrote and didn’t film in which a young Clark is taken hunting by Jonathan and they kill a deer. Clark is just gutted by the act and Jonathan explains that “it’s a powerful thing to take a life, even if you’re forced to take a life.”
