The Snyder Cut Will Be A "Radical Rethinking" Of 'Justice League', Costing Considerably More Than $30 Million To Finish
According to WarnerMedia chairman and HBO Max head Bob Greenblatt, the infamous Snyder Cut of Justice League "does not exist." Yet. But as was revealed last week, HBO Max is going to be providing funding so Snyder can make a finalized version, and one report claimed the new streamer would be spending $30 million to make that happen.
But in a new interview, Greenblatt suggests it will cost much more than that to complete, and calls the new version "a radical rethinking of that movie" and says it will be "wildly expensive." Read his full quotes below.
"It's been months of discussions with Zack and the producers to figure out how to do it," Greenblatt said on the Recode Media podcast. "Because it isn't as easy as just going into the vault and there's a Snyder Cut sitting there to put out...it does not exist. Zack is actually building it, and it's complex. Including – and I don't want to get into too much detail that we haven't already talked about yet – but new effects shots. It's a radical rethinking of that movie, and it's complicated and wildly expensive, of course a number I won't quote...I'll just say I wish it was just $30 million...It's an enormous undertaking and very complex."
That sounds like they'll be spending far more than $30 million. A few days ago, a report made the rounds claiming that no reshoots would be taking place with stars Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Henry Cavill, Ezra Miller, and Ray Fisher. The Wrap said HBO Max would give Snyder cash for "post-production, for special effects, for scoring, and even ADR," but there would be "no reshoots of any kind on this movie." But now that Greenblatt has intimated that the company is spending more than we originally thought to bring this version across the finish line, could reshoots be in the cards after all? If they do happen, the coronavirus will obviously be a huge obstacle, so they'll have to figure out a way to safely get back before cameras in time to finish the project before its release next year.
During the discussion phase of this resurrection, Greenblatt and his team ran into the same issues that has plagued other productions when alternate versions of a movie are being discussed: namely, does this version "count" as an entirely separate movie?
"We had to go to the unions and get certain things clear with them about what we were doing," he continued. "Is the Snyder Cut a new movie, or is it a recut? There's lots of complexity that the fan [community] doesn't know about."
Greenblatt says that discussions about this began in fall of 2019, and took so long that they finally hammered out all the details within the past week – and they put out the news as quickly as possible. "We were trying very hard to be able to announce it before the launch [of HBO Max], because we knew it would be very well received," he said, but this was evidently not a project that they'd been sitting on as as last-minute announcement to boost the streamer's profile in the days before they launched.
The Snyder Cut of Justice League will debut exclusively on HBO Max sometime in 2021.