Zack Snyder’s Justice League w/ Griffin Newman, David Sims (HDTGM Matinee)
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Hello, people of Earth. I have gone by many names. Some have called me...

Martian Manhunter. Others call me Tall John Shear. Welcome to How Did This Get Made? And hold on to your mother boxes. Today, we are talking about Zack Snyder's The Justice League. It's an epic, consider it bat-her return of the Superman. Here's the premise. Batman and Wonder Woman team up with the Flash, Aquaman, and Cyborg to protect the Earth from an evil that threatens to eradicate life on the planet. In doing so, they must revive Superman, and it all ends in Russia. Now, that's the plot. Now,

If you're wondering what is Zack Snyder's, uh, Justice League, let me explain it as quickly as I can possibly do it. Uh, Zack Snyder, he had planned on a five film series in the DC universe. That's Man of Steel, Batman versus Superman, a Justice League trilogy. Uh,

But because of Batman versus Superman and Suicide Squad not really working, people being upset with it, they decided they would bring in somebody to make it a little bit lighter, a little bit more fun. So they brought in Chris Terrio, who is responsible for Rise of Skywalker as well as Argo. They shoot the movie. They finish it. They're like, okay, this is pretty good. 90% complete, 100%.

Warner Brothers watches it. They say this is unwatchable. They hire Joss Whedon to come in and rewrite the script and help with the reshoots. During this time, Zack Snyder suffers a terrible family tragedy. He leaves the project. Joss Whedon then gets full control of the production. He adds 80 pages to the script, only uses 10% of Snyder's original footage.

changes the score and the movie comes out and basically people are like, at best, it's a Frankenstein movie. It's just in Congress tones. People don't really love it at all. The movie changes

kind of tanks. They go away from the franchises. They go into these individual films and then online, this growing movement of release the Snyder cut comes out. It seems like a joke. It seems like this is never going to happen. They get 180,000 signatures on some virtual petition. And all of a sudden in 2019, we hear that it's, it's

it's happening. The Snyder cut is happening. Um, it initially is going to involve some reshoots. Uh, it's going to cost about $30 million to finish. Zack Snyder comes in, he adds five minutes or less of new footage. Um, and the budget is now at $70 million to complete the film. That is what we watched four hours and two minutes of,

of a film that was 90% complete via, you know, not including VFX shots. So this is the version, and this is what we're going to get into today. And there's no better person, and there's no better people to talk about this with today than our guests, but also my co-host. Please welcome Jason Manzoukas. Paul, wow. This is, this was wild. This was a wild, this has been a wild journey to watch, um,

The, as you said, like the progression of Zack Snyder's D like larger DCEU, uh, the creation of it as it's been going, I have not enjoyed it as it's been going along. I am, uh, I am a, a, I was a Marvel kid, not a DC kid, but I'm,

Fully open to DC movies. I liked the Richard Donner Batman. I mean, Superman, rather. I enjoyed Nolan's Batman. Same. But these movies, Man of Steel, and then just in preparation for this, this is the nightmare that I've decided to live in. In preparation for this conversation, I have watched...

The Batman v. Superman extended cut that is three hours long. A mistake. And is like, it might as well be a concrete brutalist piece of architecture. It is so insane. And then I watched Whedon's cut, and I watched the Snyder cut. I did that. So we are here. For those of you complaining that you just watched the Snyder cut, fuck.

I watched all of it. I did too. And I'm excited to talk to you. and I've got takes, I've got takes for days. Bring these guests. Let's do this. I cannot wait. Uh, this is going to probably be a different episode. I have a feeling it's going to be different. Um, and never have I been so thankful that, uh,

June Diane Rayfield is out of town and unable to record because we would never have a chance to do this episode. Uh, she would not stand for it. And rightly so, rightly so. I don't think she would even let you watch this movie at home. I don't believe so. Yes. So don't you have, doesn't she have parental blocks on certain channels for you? I, she does it on my computer and on my phone. Uh,

I can only watch YouTube kids. Look, I will say that my history with June in superhero movies is very... I've been banned from YouTube kids. The only... Well, that's because you make those weird, like... Those weird Mario walkthrough videos. All right, so, yes. June's only... The only two superhero movies I think June has seen... Well, definitely Wonder Woman. Definitely Ant-Man.

And she fell asleep during Guardians of the Galaxy 1. That's where I know where she's at. So this would really be a tricky one for her to get into. But we have decided to cross over, share the space with one of our favorite podcasts. I'm going to introduce them both individually, but talk about their podcast. First of all, you know them as...

as together as the host of Blank Check, which reviews directors' complete filmographies, episode to episode, specifically auteurs whose early successes afforded them a rare blank check from Hollywood to produce passion projects. Each new miniseries kind of breaks them down, gets into great detail. Right now they're doing this amazing bracket, directors against directors going up against each other, which is just fantastic. But

Individually. Individually, they are also hashtag the two friends. Yes, they are. Don't worry. They are also hashtag the two friends. And let's not forget that sometimes those checks, they cash and sometimes they bounce, baby.

Oh, please welcome our first guest, Griffin Newman. You know him as Arthur on The Tick or Watto on the George Lucas talk show. He also lends his voice to the upcoming Masters of the Universe revelation on Netflix. Griffin, how are you?

How are you? I'm doing all right. Uh, you know, Jason was, uh, throwing down his, his bonafides for how deep he had gone into Snyder in the last week. I did all of that plus man of steel and dawn of the dead. So I, I feel like I spent, yeah, I want to go back to the beginning. I want to go back to the beginning. Yeah. See the whole thing. Uh,

All right. And our next co-host for today's show, also a host of Blank Check, please welcome David Sims. He's a film critic at The Atlantic. And his interview with Chloe Zhao is excellent. If you have not read that, she directed No Man Land. So please welcome David Sims. How are you, David? Thank you. I'm doing well. It was fun. I feel like Chloe and I mostly talked about her dogs. We kept swinging back around to her dogs in that interview. That's what I remember most.

I would like to say that I watched the Snyder cut and then I said to my wife, like, you know, maybe I throw on the Joss Whedon version because I only saw it once and she was like, I don't want you to do that.

And so all I did was I watched the Snyder Cut. But look, I saw it all before. I've seen all this stuff. We should say that David has a one month old. So the fact that you were able to even steal four hours to watch this is impressive. We we pulled you out of paternity leave and we appreciate you doing this. And it's something that we are excited to have here. I want to before we even get into this film.

Is there any hot takes on where you rank, like, the DC universe? I'm opening up to everybody. Jason, I know we talked about you already, more of a, you know, more of a Marvel guy as am I. You know, I have not enjoyed the Marvel... I have not rather enjoyed the DC movies almost at all. You know, like, they have been... I would say largely for me, with the single exception of Wonder Woman 1, they have been...

unexceptional, uninteresting, and kind of overwhelmed by this Zack Snyder gloom. I'm going to disagree with you right off the bat and say Aquaman. Shazam is fun. Shazam is fun. Aquaman, Birds of Prey, and Shazam are all

are all, I really, I, I, I. Those are movies to me that are, they are good in comparison to these other terrible movies. But if, but none of them, I think what I put up against Thor Ragnarok.

Well, that's a hard, that's a, that's a, that's. Why? Why? Why can't they do a Thor? Why can't they do, why can't they get there? That, because that's like, we're still in the beginning. We're not in the 10 year anniversary yet. I mean, Thor Ragnarok came out after the 10 years. But DC's acting like they're not at the beginning. That's my problem. DC is like drowning the marketplace with stuff. Like, and, and we can get into it, but I mean, my hottest of hot takes is, and I hate to say this because I believe that

The only reason we have the Snyder Cut is because of Toxic Fandom. And because Toxic Fandom was rewarded, which is now only going to embolden Toxic fans...

Because Toxic Fandom was rewarded, we got the Snyder Cut, and I'm here to say the Snyder Cut is a better version of the movie Justice League full stop. Yes. 100%. Yes. Far better. Far. Far better. I mean, it's also four hours long and has, like,

multiple moments of like minutes long exposition dumps, but nonetheless, I'm in, I want to, I want to, I want to, at least I want to break it down, but I want to hear where you guys stand. Uh, David Griffin about, uh,

Just the DCU, where you're at, what do you feel, what do you like, what don't you like? I just, let me, before we get into this, I just want to state that we had sort of fallen in backwards into sort of doing an ersatz DC Universe miniseries on our podcast, even though we don't really do franchises like that. And it was because...

Of the weirdness of the fact that Warner Brothers seemed to be handing the whole thing over to Snyder. You know, like we were very much about like director visions and the weirdness of, oh, Marvel is so managed. It's Feige. He has control. He hands it to different people. Everything has to fit in together. And DC went like everyone reverse engineer your movies from the template that Snyder created.

Yeah.

D.C. has diversified more. The films are becoming more individual, more separate from each other. You know, it's like we don't need to cover them all as if they're one thing. And I had been pushing, knowing that David was going to go on to a months long paternity break. We have to do Snyder Cut in some way. And David would just go, no, no, no, no. I get five words into. But what if we know? Absolutely not. I'm not taking time. I'm not. I'm not.

They announced. I figured this was coming in like May. Remember, this thing kind of just came out. I mean, obviously, we knew it was coming. But then they suddenly were just like, yeah, it's coming out mid-March. Like, it's just going to drop. Like, I thought it was coming in the summer. They announced it's coming like three weeks after my daughter's birth. I'm like, I absolutely will not watch this.

a four hour movie. I forgot what I think I didn't realize was newborn babies are very demanding, but they are very immobile. So you are actually kind of watching a lot of TV. It's the best time because they don't require, they require a lot, but also not so much. It's like, it's,

You are grounded. Yeah, you are grounded. You are grounded and you are working, but there is a simplicity to it. Once they start moving, it's a whole other ballgame. Are you saying your baby's first movie experience was the Snyder Cut?

No, because my baby's had, I mean, I'm watching a lot of movies right now, but one of my baby's first movie experiences was the Snyder Cut. Certainly. That's like, that's chilling. My two week old baby, she started hiccuping about two hours into it and there was like an hour of hiccuping. What if your baby's first world is Mama Box? Mama Box?

Yeah, she calls my wife Martha for some reason. Look, the Martha dig is so easy. I shouldn't do it. It's good. Yeah, I know. Look, I...

I remember seeing Batman versus Superman colon Dawn of Justice at the press screening. I was sitting with a bunch of critics. If you guys remember, there's a scene in that movie where the flash emerges into a dream that Bruce Wayne is having and yells stuff at him. Do you guys remember what I'm talking about? I'm too early.

Right, right. And it's a scene that is dropped in without explanation. And yes, we're all smart enough to know, like, this is probably some, you know, larger universe play than that scene. But it is unexplained.

And we all burst out laughing. Like that's how we felt in 2016. Just all these critics. I remember just sitting in a row. Just, we watched this. We're like, what, what does this thing think it is? Like, what is this doing? And I'm thinking five years from now, the, I'm not going to call it turnaround, but the sort of evolution I have made on Zack Snyder's whole sincere deal with this DC universe is,

is surprising to me. Yeah, that's all. That's how I'll put it. A good friend of mine last night, who is a very big comic book fan, reached out to me and he's like, what did you think of the Snyder cut? And I said, I think he only should make four hour long movies because there was something about this movie that felt like

Like, oh, this is the most complete version of this director that I've ever seen. And I was there for it. I feel like the way he cut it up was like it recognized that, OK, you could watch it in parts. It was it. I

I don't know. There was something about the way that this movie gelled that worked for me. Like on, on a, sure there's things to make fun of or whatever, but yes, there is something that really works here. And I was just, it is just, especially if you watch it in juxtaposition with the Joss Whedon cut or actually with Batman V Superman, uh,

It is simply more cohesive, more interesting, more successful, more successfully plotted. You know, like this, the Justice League movie is confoundingly plotted, right? In the release cut, in the theatrical cut, right? Yeah.

Right. The theatrical cut was like truly two hours of nonsense. Like it really was Russian family, like even like the populated Russian town that Steppenwolf is the single bad guy. They're both, you know, in two hours, they're trying to build a team, fight a world building evil. Right.

Resurrect Superman. Introduce three heroes. Right. Introduce three heroes. They have essentially not been in movies before. Yes. Origin story characters who they just simply don't. They just show. Instead, they just show up and are now there. Cyborg might be one of my favorite characters now. Like, literally. Here's how much I enjoyed the Snyder Cut. To a degree, I was like, the minute it started, my first note is, fuck you, it's in 4.3. Oh.

I was like, fuck you. How dare you make me watch a different aspect ratio? 20 minutes later, I'm like, I don't care. I don't care that it's in 4.3. This is infinitely better at explaining what's happening to me and tonally, consistently, tonally consistent throughout, which the score helped, which his editing helped. I don't know. It just worked better. I stopped taking notes. I stopped taking notes because I was like,

I'm here. I'm in like every now and then I might jot down one thing, but I was like, you have pulled me into a world. And now I also get like people like, Oh, it's CGI and slow-mo, but it, it felt like I was going over to someone's house to have a meal that I'd never had before. Right? Like, yes, there are a lot of things that I may not have picked myself. There are a lot of things that may not even be my favorite thing, but in presenting the,

being presented in a loving way, I was open to trying everything there and I found myself liking it more than I ever thought I would have. Okay, I need to share my hottest take that I've been sitting on. The kid, Griffin Newman coming in. Ha ha ha!

I'm overflowing with hot already. We're touched on so many things that I'm just like champing at the bit to please just interrupt. Champ away. But I will say right off the bat, because you're asking for a previous history. David and I are much like you guys. We're more Marvel zombies than than D.C. fans.

I think I like DC a little more than David does. Like, I actually read more DC comics, I think, at our comic reading peak than you, because you never really read DC titles at all, right? Only stuff like when Grant Morrison did All-Star Superman. You know, when people would come in and have some sort of like...

contained take. But anytime I tried to swoop in and be like, you know what? I'm going to read all the Batman titles. I would tap out really fast because I was just like, I can't, you know, like I... Reading comic books, if you really want to do it, it's this...

It's very time consuming. You got a lot, a lot of shit to keep up with. And so Marvel was always as much as I could handle. You seem overwhelmed by the concept of reading comic books. As a child. It's too much. Without a cell phone, I imagine, or internet. I'm just imagining you as a young boy on the streets of New York City going into the comic shop to buy your comics. I have no reason to believe. Waving his arms around. There are too many titles.

There's too many titles. I'm just a young boy living in New York City. You know, I know where you're going, Jason, but I was a young boy in New York City. I did go to the comic shop until nine years of age. And then I went to the comic shop in London. And then you were like, whoa, give me that Judge Dredd.

You were like, give me those English. Captain Britain. Yeah, exactly. I can't read to read Dennis the Menace, but the different one. I did read the Beano. I forget if we've talked about this on my podcast, Griffin. Anyway, Griffin, can you have a take? Yes. So I was just going to say I was less of a DC guy, but the three titles I read semi-regularly and kept up with the universes of were Flash, Batman, and Teen Titans. Yes.

So, like, three members of this team essentially comprise the only things I ever seriously followed in the DC Universe, right? I'm ostensibly in the tank for. In terms of my rankings, it was always, like, Wonder Woman's probably my favorite modern superhero movie point blank. Like, I prefer Wonder Woman to all the MCU movies, I think, because...

But then I put pretty much every other MCU movie in between there. I'd say like Shazam is close to Wonder Woman for me on that tier. And then I like Birds of Prey and Aquaman with some reservations. And then everything else I could pretty much leave behind. Right. I love Aquaman. I'm a huge Aquaman fan. Thank you, David. To me, I'm excited to have you on because I also there's something about Aquaman that I will say. And I've talked about this. It's interesting.

It is, in many respects, like, what a child would want a superhero movie to be, and I love it. Like, I just love it because it's like, let's do that, and let's do... And there's something so pure. And again, like this movie, it's a pure vision, and I think you can, like...

Joker's a whole other story. But I don't mind that when people with pure visions get involved in this, they make their version. And sometimes it really works. And Aquaman for me really worked in that way. I have to say something before Griffin says his take just before I lose the thread. I do think with DC, sincerity is crucial. Those heroes are much more sincere. They are these very simple heroes, not in...

In terms of characterization, but just like in terms of what they stand for. Marvel was the second tier. The second guys coming in and, you know, offering more commentary and more grip. But DC, there's purity, like you say. So Wonder Woman, Aquaman, these successful movies, usually they were approaching their material very sincerely. And that's why they succeeded, I would say.

Yes. And I think the difference for me and I want to make it clear, I like Aquaman just less than David. It's so good. I watched it. I watched it again recently. It's so good. I think the thing those two movies do really well is embrace all the silliest aspects of the characters that made them feel unadaptable for so long and put a lot of very earnest appreciation into the sort of pure totemic quality of what they represent. Right. Right.

Yeah. And I always was just kind of bummed out by the Snyder, like, oh, they hate being heroes. This world is so bleak. It's so dark. I mean, it always just kind of felt like Zack Snyder hates superheroes as a concept to me, you know? And, like, even when he was doing Watchmen and doing press for Watchmen, he kept on saying, like, I would never make a Superman movie. I don't get that guy. These are the kinds of heroes I understand. They're, like...

drunk and they're angry and they're bitter and they're washed up, you know, like he kind of framed it that way. And then the fact that he became the architect of this whole universe kind of bummed me out because it is depressively dark view of this thing. And BVS was kind of like, for me, a real breaking point where I was just like, this is like incoherent to me. You know, beyond it feeling oppressive, this thing just like makes no sense.

sense it is just confounding on a scene to scene basis and my hottest take is that in my prep week I watched the ultimate cut and I was like oh I get it

Wow. Okay. I don't even know if I like it. I don't know if it's a bridge too far to say that, but like talking about what you said, Paul, of like you watch the four hours of this and go, maybe you should only make four hour movies. Yeah. BVS is like incoherent, perplexing two and a half hours. And you watch the ultimate cut and you're like, this makes sense on its own terms. I understand it. And perhaps you can only let Snyder go full Snyder and trying to reign him in at all is a recipe for disaster. Well, that's the mistake.

that is born out of both of these extended cuts is it illustrates to you that he did... He was... The messes that came out... The messes that came out were partially messes because so much had to be extracted to make the... You know, basically...

Marvel, Marvel phase one is 10 movies long to set the stage for, you know, all of these individuals, then bringing them together into teams, then building out. They pop up in each other's movies, little bits here and there, you know, they do a good job of walking you into a constructed world of all of these people and how they're now all going to gel or not gel together in this sense.

They tried to do something similar, but I think Snyder's version of it was, let me just make the movies three plus hours long and we'll get all of those character introductions. We'll get all, we just won't do it in individual movies. And Warner Brothers was like, no, we need two hour movies, man. We need two hour movies. Yeah. And that's too much. To me, the fact that 90% of this movie was shot, like,

I mean, really, it was, I mean, 90% of this movie was done or whatever it was. Yeah, 100% was shot. It was 90% locked, essentially. Okay, right. Minus final effects. So that, to me, it speaks volumes. Like, oh, he shot a four-hour movie. Like, there's no version. I mean, the only, I guess we're all talking about the same thing. It was like,

He made a four hour. Like, how do you make this smaller? Like, oh, we saw what it is. You can't like he. Right. He's not writing within the confines of movie making. No. And this is the most bananas thing to me, which I feel like we need to sort of acknowledge as we get deeper into everything. Obviously, the term everyone used for the Joss Whedon cut was Frankenstein. Right. It's if I dare say it, a cyborg version of a movie. Right. Right.

Where they like took this much human and then built all these weird robotics around and they're like, this will be normal, right? This thing will not be cursed. But I do think it is important because the framing of this now is like he finally got to make his absolute pure vision of the movie, which I don't think is totally accurate because there are two things, one of which you already said, Paul, which is.

After the response to BVS, which was largely negative, they were at that point, I think, six weeks away from starting filming on Justice League. They were so bullish on it that they were like, we're going right in. And then the response to BVS was bad.

even though it made money, but I think they felt like, oh, we can't double down on this. So then they like go red alert, Terrio and Snyder rewrite this, make it brighter, change the look of the movie. Like you have to make this lighter. So there was already an adjustment before Snyder started filming all of the footage that finally made it into this film.

Friends of mine in the press were brought on set for Justice League. They were shown, they were filming the scene where Batman and the Flash meet, you know, and it's sort of a jokey scene. That's the one that they push so hard. Yes. And they were really pushing to the press and Snyder included were like, look, look, you know, this is

is going to be a little lighter. Don't worry. I know Batman versus Superman was a lot. They were trying to sound like... Batman versus Superman was so... I mean, and this is what it is for... To be considering... If you were to look at these two comics universes, DC and Marvel, unquestionably, DC is bright, poppy, like Boy Scout ethic gods. It's gods on Earth. It's very... It's morality tales. It is...

It is a blue sky with the exception of Batman. And then Marvel exists in the real world. It is real people who have real problems on top of the fact that they are superheroes. Spider-Man is a kid who can't figure it out. He's really struggling. And then he gets superpowers and has to, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Now, I think also for so long, DC had the upper hand.

The upper leg on the sort of bug nuts cosmic shit. I feel like Marvel had less success with that. And a lot of the stuff's been reclaimed now. But like the fourth world stuff, but even just Green Lantern, all these things from early on, it was like the Marvel heroes were grounded and DC was able to deal with like it's gods, it's aliens, it's interdimensional, it's alternate realities. Things that Marvel has now caught up to that DC really nailed first. Yeah.

When I watch these movies, it's as if the lesson learned was, okay, Nolan's Batman is all of D.C.,

Like, in these movies, there is no real discernible difference between Gotham, Metropolis, and Central City. Genuinely. Like, Central City is, in the Snyder Cut, when you get to have that scene with Iris, which is an incredible introduction for Flash. And the fact that they cut that out is absurd. Every introduction in this movie is...

phenomenal like he's phenomenal he's great and 15 minutes long both of those things it's both but it's so helpful in understanding yes and putting this character in context in the team especially if you're not gonna take the time to do a flash movie first a cyborg movie first an Aquaman movie first like let's admit another advantage that

Snyder Cut has watching it in 2021 is we've seen an Aquaman movie already, right? There's like retroactively heavy lifting done there. And then it does help that this movie in the restored version, Flash and Cyborg are the two characters who get the most development and the best introductions and the clearest emotional arcs within the film itself.

And they benefit for the movie benefits for having a better understanding. I mean, without a doubt, way for Cyborg, it's night and day in terms of how much more you understand about this character's journey and arc comparatively. You know what I mean? Cyborg is literally the...

the heart of the movie in a way. But I mean, but it's like, but like, it's the reason why Superman comes back. It's, it's, it is the, all the emotional, all the true, like big hearted moments. It's not between the characters saving the day. It really is about like the sacrifice of, of, of Joe Morton, who look, this guy, we know if he's working in the lab, shit is going to go wrong. I mean, we know this now from Terminator 2. And this guy,

Don't have him near any metal men. It's not good. But on the other hand, how are you Warner Brothers and you look at this cut and you go, first thing that has to go, all the Joe Morton scenes. Like Joe Morton's in like two minutes of Joss Whedon. That guy's fucking money in the bank. Yeah. So good.

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So hiring Joss Whedon to make a sequel to Batman versus Superman, let's say, forget that Justice League, they literally, they make Batman versus Superman and they're like, Joss Whedon, soup to nuts, make Justice League. That would be a bad decision. That would be a tough thing to pivot to.

Having him make a movie inside of a movie that was already made is a worse decision. The most insane decision is telling him also it's got to be two hours long. 120 minutes, no more, no less, which has been widely reported they insisted on for whatever reason. I mean, I will say this. Like, there's something I'm a...

Let's just take away the allegations right now and just talk about, I'm not trying to separate the artist from the thing. I just want to just talk about it in a pure way and go, I love Joss Whedon and what he did on Buffy. I was a big fan. When I first saw the Avengers, I was like, this is good. It's not my favorite, but it was good. Like I was like, I like it. I really didn't like Age of Ultron.

And when I saw what the Russo brothers did to Civil War, I was like, oh, that's that's my Avengers movie. Like that's like that's how you do a team movie in the Marvel Universe that feels like it's got the right tone. My thought was, why do you take the guy who essentially fucks up the team movie in the Marvel Universe and then bring them over to fix up the.

Your problem in the DC, you know, it's like, oh, he's already proven that that's not his strong suit. Like, he messed it up, right? I'll say this. David and I are definitely Whedon Avengers fans over Russo Avengers fans. But even still, it is very bizarre to...

hand that to him after Age of Ultron which had a similarly complicated reaction to the degree that also Whedon like kind of like steps away from Marvel and there's this like he fought with the studio on that one whatever I mean

Hiring Whedon was bizarre is all I'm saying under any circumstance. It's on multiple levels. It makes like just the idea of bringing anyone in to do it is already going to be problematic. But somebody who's so totally different. Right. Right. Is like. It just speaks to the fact that they were. I think it sounds like Warners was so panicked. Right.

Right. And how hopeless and dour and dark Snyder's worldview was that they were like, let's bring in, you know, like you watch these two, if you watch, and I don't recommend anybody do this ever. If you watch both the Snyder cut and the Whedon cut, like back to back, you see how there are reshoots that are like keeping Snyder eye

Aquaman line and then just change reshooting Batman's response line just to be a quip

All Joss does is introduce like Buffy style, Joss Whedon style jokes, quips, you know, ironic eye rolls. You're watching a script polish, but it's in a movie, like rather than just on a page. Right. He's like, you know, an infamous script doctor, you know, and punch up guy who did that for so long before he had his own success doing his own stuff.

And you're like, yes, it feels like you're watching him going through the script page by page and going, what if you added this? What if you added this? But it's like... Something that like Shane Black can do effortlessly for Iron Man 1. And it actually probably, it probably cements why Iron Man 1 works. And thus we have the MCU. Right. But in this instance, it doesn't make sense at all. Yeah. Proof is in the pudding as far as like,

Ben Affleck in this movie. This Batman in the Snyder Cut is... I'm like, ooh, I like this Batman. That other Batman is bizarre. It's... I don't know. I just feel like it's more consistent. There's... I mean, it's hard to...

To have an actor do one version of the character and then the rewrite is they're not even quips. They're out of they're out of the voice. I remember one of my friends told me that they did a punch up one time. It was a movie where aliens were in the house of this like young teen star. I forget the name of the movie. I would say it if I remembered it. Aliens in the Attic.

It might have been aliens. Yeah. I mean, yes. All right. So yes, I think it was. And the idea was that when they shot the movie, the aliens didn't speak any discernible language. And then the studio is like, ooh, we need to now add language like as if they were speaking the entire time. So everyone had to come in and like generate language around the movie that they were shot to not have them responding to language.

Which is, you know, an insurmountable feat. But that's kind of what it feels like here. Yes. Like, well, how can he in one scene be like the Zack Snyder Batman and then another scene be like the Joss Whedon? They're very different characters. Well, it also, it feels like, you know, with most of like Punch-Up Jobs, you know,

They bring people on right before the movie shoots to go, can you make this any funnier? Right. Yeah. That's the best and cheapest way to do it. You add the jokes in before the cameras start rolling. Right. Yes. Then the two things that people tend to do after the fact, if a movie isn't working and plot points are messy or you need more jokes or whatever, are how much of this can we fix in editing and ADR? Right. Because, you know, we can't change too much of it or something.

We only have the budget and the schedule to do like one week of reshoots. If we could only add five scenes, what are the five scenes we need to add or less or more or whatever? Right. And this is like it's like they hand it to him and he went, well, if I was there on the day, I would have done this. But obviously we can't. And then went like, no, don't pitch anything. We'll fix it in CGI. Right.

Like it's like it was an animated movie where he was like, yeah, I can't change that now. And they were like, you can we can bring Affleck in, put in front of a green screen. It's a year and a half later. His drinking problems have risen again. But we'll get the one line from him and then edit it into a previous conversation. And you're talking about Batman feeling different as Affleck has said, like he was supposed to do his solo Batman movie that he wrote and directed right after this. And he stepped down.

And the story that he said recently in interviews is he showed the script to a friend and they went – he went, I don't know. Do you think I should do this? And they said, I think the script is good. I think you could make a good movie. I think if you go through this Batman thing again, you're literally going to drink yourself to death after what happened on Justice League. And you do feel like there's a very specific performance in BVS, right? Yeah.

And then here is like he's a little bit responding to the negativity of BVS and he's trying to get a little bit lighter. Right. Yeah. And then Justice League is the Whedon version is like watching a man who is just dead inside, is regretting this. Why did I do Daredevil again? I won an Oscar. What am I doing here?

I am now an established director. By the way, trusting a guy that he worked with on Argo, too. Like you feel like, OK, I'm I've protected myself in every possible way. And now I've been someone pulled the carpet right out from under me. And yeah, and screwed me over. This is the one other thing I want to say about the weirdness of this not being a complete vision even still is the plan was Chris Terrio had written two complete scripts.

There was Justice League Part 1 and Justice League Part 2. They were going to be shot back-to-back. And with the trepidation after BVS, they went, let's pull the brakes, only do one now, do two later. So what we're watching now is the four-hour cut of what was only supposed to be the first half of a two-part movie. There's still a whole second half they never got to. And I think in some ways—

Like the reshoots and some re-editing and effects stuff he's done. He's tried to retrofit some of the stuff he would have done in part two into this movie. But like Darkseid was not even supposed to be in this this much. I think they added more Darkseid. He was just supposed to be like even less. And then two was Darkseid, right? The end of one is...

he has kind of talked about there being three like movies but yes so i think there were definitely two scripts ready to go though right they were they had this back-to-back plan they also had you know the riddler was in the bat bat uh ben affleck movie and he was gonna like solve the anti-life equation you know there was a lot of like track late that they then dynamited but yeah

The only thing they reshot for this movie with people. And it was Jim. To be clear, it was Jim Carrey's Riddler. Yes. Of course. He was back. He was back. All the classic Jim Carrey characters coming back in the Warner Brothers canon. Right. He had the popcorn machine mind reading thing. Yeah.

The epilogue is the major reshoot, right? That's like the only reshoot. It's the only reshoot. They shot three days to do that epilogue. Now, they may have added other stuff with CG or whatever, but that's the only footage they shot. I think that the flashback scene is...

Oh, I think the flashback scene with Darkseid is a reshoot, but because it's not human act, I think it's CGI. They did a lot of CGI motion capture-y stuff with Darkseid and Steppenwolf. They fully redesigned Steppenwolf. I mean, just on an effects level. Yeah.

They redesigned stuff. They made the, you know, all the, and I will say, I liked all of the dark side. Introducing dark side and letting there be a bigger bad than just Steppenwolf and the parademons was beneficial. It made, it gave context to Steppenwolf and why he's doing what he's doing. Also, like in the Whedon cut, I don't understand what mother boxes are at all.

And in this one, in the Snyder Cut, the only reason I mostly do is because Wonder Woman does a three and a half minute exposition dump to Bruce Wayne. She's like, well, all I can tell is, and then she talks for three and a half minutes based exclusively, I believe, on cave painting. Yeah. I think her knowledge, her minutes worth of knowledge is,

is from looking at like pictographs. I was like, what is this? Them mascara, they understand. They go deep. She's an antiquities expert. Yeah. By the way, I do want to talk about that. Like there is something, there are, and they go away. There are very funny things in this movie still. Like when she is in that museum wearing what looks to me like a,

Like an outfit that you might wear on a premiere. She's wearing like a very form-fitting, like white, just a gorgeous, like you would see it in... Pristine, clean cut. Not the kind of thing you take to work where you restore art. Where you've got like a chisel and a brush. And she's not in any, no, like there's no smock over it. There's no, there's nothing. It's just like, I'm...

It did make me go, that is an odd choice. That is an odd choice. He makes odd choices. I honestly, the thing that most surprised me in terms of when you're watching this, I honestly figured that the Whedon had added in the Wonder Woman museum rescue sequence because that felt so tacked on.

And it's plays better in this kind. I'm sorry. My biggest surprise. I was a hundred percent certain that Whedon had tacked on the cyborg and flash go grave digging and bond sequence. Yes. Yes. I could not believe that that was in the original cut. And not only that's like 12 minutes and all of them are there.

Few things were surprising, but that was. I thought that was surprising as well, only because Whedon, you know, with Buffy, has spent so much time in graveyards. It's like one of his signature settings. To him, it's like Frasier's recording booth in Frasier. It's Central Perk. He just thought this is a good set to have some characters share funny quips. I mean, Gunter was in there. Gunter wasn't. He's in the graveyard. That's in the

Snyder cut. That's what's so weird is Gunter is just there in the graveyard. He is CGI. Fully CGI. Right. But let's, I mean, cause we, we, we talked a lot about the movie, like the general sense of the movie. Let's talk about this epilogue. Cause that is the new footage. Like that is this. I think what you're talking about, this idea of like, this is throwing, uh,

towards the overall vision. I think that there's a couple moves here that he is basically going like, this is what we were going to do and now suck it. Like, you know, like I think that that like, or maybe making a play to be like, let me take the Justice League in my own world and now I will exist separately from this and let me go make my things and I think you should make them exclusively for HBO Max. But that ending is,

I'm going to go in the most suspect of Jared Leto being in this ending as the Joker. I'm going to go in and I got to say, I was even like, I was like, am I, am I, is it four hours and two minutes? Like, am I three hours and 15 minutes in and going, am I worn down? I, but I kind of like Stockholm syndrome, but I like this. I like the scene. I like this. Okay. Batman and Joker. Let's yeah. Yeah. Talk to me about this. Well, here's, I,

I just want to say something. I want to hear Griffin's take on this. We're at this point talking about this is the second to last ending in the movie, right? Yes. So we're talking, I believe it's, is it called Nightfall? Nightfall.

uh it's the nightmare with a k nightmare nightmare yes nightmare um it's the apple now because the movie ends it fully ends you see every hero you know has rediscovered their sense of purpose you see the flash running you see superman opening his shirt you know right like it's everyone's happy and then it's like and 20 more minutes you know and whereas like i do think

The movie would be better as a movie if it actually ended at the ending at Superman opening his shirt. The epilogue feels like you say more like Snyder kind of being like, and look, here's a bunch of stuff I had planned. Right. Interested, you know, picture plan was like, by all accounts, movie one was Steppenwolf, right? Teeing up movie to dark side. That's the escalation. Yes. Movie three was evil Superman.

Right. Like his whole thing was – because you see this in BVS. It's the first of the two dream sequences that then amounts to Flash showing up and saying, I'm too early, right? He was so obsessed with this alternate timeline of – and he's made this clear now, but Warner Brothers shot it down. The thing was supposed to be that –

Batman slept with Lois Lane. Say Cucks. Batman Cucks Superman. That was his pitch. Yes. Right. And then Superman goes apocalyptic and it creates just a horrible hellscape for everybody. So that's what he was working towards. You see that in BVS. And then I think he just was like, well, I'm never going to get to make my other two movies unless I leave people salivating at the end of this one.

It's a grand play. I mean, it does make sense. It's like he knows the movie is finished. So he tacks on truly the next time, the next time on the, the end of like, it's a teaser. Yeah. The Lex, the Lex Luthor sequence, and then the dream sequence of the future. And then the Martian Manhunter saying like, by the way, Bruce, great job. See you later. When was that? By the way, when was that? Joe? Cause I remember Joe Manganiello. There was like a,

that maybe Ben Affleck put. In the Whedon one, in the established Deathstroke, it's different a little bit in this one. It's weird. There's a lot of examples of this in the movie where, having watched the two cuts pretty close together, too close together, there are a lot of examples where it's like, oh, this wasn't reshot by Whedon, but they just chose different lines from the same scene. Yeah.

Or the ADR different responses. I don't know. But it is like the dialogue in the Mangionello-Eisenberg ending in the Whedon cut is entirely different, but it clearly wasn't re-shot. That one, the whole buildup is it's time we build a league of our own.

And this one, it's Batman's Bruce Wayne. Go do the business. Yeah, and Madonna from A League of Their Own is in this scene. Yeah, and she's, by the way, she's good. And Lex Luthor is like, there's no crying in villainy. He says that. It's true. I will say that

Red Letter Media did this thing that I loved where they were breaking down Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And in the trailer of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the Indiana Jones, the Shia LaBeouf Indiana Jones movie, you know, he's like Shia LaBeouf, like in the trailer, yells up to Indy, like, you're a teacher. And he looks down really badass. And he's like, part time, you know, like, and then in the movie, he says it like,

Part time. Yeah. It's a very... It's like the trailer has the better delivery of the line that you're like, yeah! And...

And the movie, it's like, and you watch the movie, you're like, why did you pick that? You had it. You have it. And that's what this movie feels like. It's like, well, you had it, right? Why would you go over here? That's the most surprising thing is when you watch it and you're like, oh, they had all those pieces. It's not like that was a thing he reshot. They just chose the worst takes

and the worst lines to keep in. What was I going to say, though? You have the Eisenberg-Manginello thing, which was shot at the time by Snyder. And then the other two prologues were the two things he shot new for this. Now, I did read an interview with him where he said that his original plan was he wanted to be Green Lantern at the end of the movie. And it was first he wanted Ryan Reynolds, Hal Jordan.

And then that was just like a non-starter. So then it was, I want a different Green Lantern. I'll work with Warner Brothers. We can pick which character it is and who's playing them. And they went along with it for a while and then said, J.J. Abrams is going to do this big Green Lantern HBO series. We want to keep that clean. Can you change it? So the Affleck side of that was shot with the assumption that they would film a Green Lantern later or do it with CGI. My understanding is he shot a Green Lantern movie.

With a gun? He shot a Green Lantern with a gun. But he was drinking heavily. And he said, fine, if I can't do Green Lantern, nobody can do Green Lantern. My thought was, and what I really liked, the final end reveal of the Martian Manhunter and how they seeded it in the beginning, is that that character has been established throughout all of the Zack Snyder films. He's in Man of Steel. Right, which felt to me like, oh, well, that's way more interesting that Martian Manhunter has been established

Sure. You know, like, I just feel like that was maybe one of those happy accidents because it makes the movie look way more complete. He shot the thing with Lois and Martha during the original shoot and had storyboarded that when she walks out.

turns into Martian Manhunter. And then that was cut even before he got pushed off the movie. Like that was, they never did the effect. So he was able to salvage that and the seeds had been planted. Yeah. Here's the, here's my big question to you guys though. Look, I,

I think, like, well, everything we're saying here, this movie is four hours long. I think there is a three-hour version of this movie that is theatrically viable, right? Obviously, Warner Brothers is never going to release a four-hour movie, but you can, there's, this movie is full of sequences that you would horse trade with a studio where they're like, can we take out the Icelandic folk song? Yes. No. No, you can't. Look, I'm not saying, like, no. Okay. David.

David, how dare you? That's like my favorite part. My favorite part of the movie is like the Icelandic dirge. She smells the sweater. Can I keep four of the seven slow-mo sequences? Four of the seven. That's what I was going to say. Speed up any slow-mo just a little bit. You saved 30 minutes right there. He speed ramps within slow-mo. He will speed. He'll go. Anyway, sorry. Go ahead. Here's my question. Here's my question. Okay. Okay. So.

Every time Aquaman walks out of the ocean, like when he rescues the guy off the boat, right? He rescues the guy off the boat. He brings him in and he throws him on the table. Aquaman is wearing a shirt. Where did he get that shirt? Because then when he walks out, he takes it off and jumps in the water. So he's got an opportunity between jumping on land

to grab a shirt that he's only going to wear while he's on land because then he's got to get rid of it. He does that twice in the movies. He's got like drop boxes all across the planet. He's got like shirt piles. He's got shirts because he also, he doesn't leave the shirt there and be like, hey, I'm going to pick this shirt up later. He tossed,

into the ocean. The girls, the women of the town take a shirt. They take it like... They sniff it. They sniff it. They sniff his sweater. I mean, maybe they place it in places. But I guess my thought is, what would you rather have on? A wet shirt or wet boots? Because just kick the boots off. Like at a certain point, like you're walking and I mean, I know it's rocky there. I will ask this about... We're kind of picking some parts of it. Um...

Do you believe that the cameo in the Aquaman world was intentional? I believe it was. And the cameo I'm talking about is the drummer from the fire battle. And I'm talking about the octopus. The octopus got a nice close-up in this. And, you know, last time we saw him, he was playing the drums. Yeah, he was playing the drums.

Much like in The Little Mermaid, how Sebastian the Crab, the court composer, is a crucial member of policymaking. It seems like the drumming octopus in the Aquaman world is the same. I'm not going to let you get a plug in for the recent blank check miniseries about Disney animated films, including Little Mermaid.

A hot crustacean band, yeah. Yep. And one other thing I want to bring up that is an odd... We talked about bad choices.

Amber Heard in the Whedon one, no accent. This is bizarre. Amber Heard in Aquaman, no accent. Yes. That's the thing that pushes it over the edge. I was trying to do the math on this. I'm like, is it possible she shot it with a British accent? When Whedon came on, he was like, she should be American. They ADR'd it because the footage is shared largely. Yes. And then when Juan makes his Aquaman film, they're like, well...

the one that got released, she had an American accent, so let's go with that. I will say this. I think her dropping the accent was the right call. I think she is more comfortable in the part with the American accent. Dafoe doesn't have an accent. There's no world building where we're saying... It's like Star Wars. The Imperials are...

That's for the most part. That is, you know, they're played primarily by British actors, you know, with some exceptions. But there's no like the Aquaman world is not doesn't have that same kind of thing. No, no. It ends up being a funny Star Wars thing where it's like, why does Princess Leia have a British accent for that one scene and then never again?

You know? Yeah. Where it's like this weird remnant of like... It's so bizarre. Let's talk about this epilogue, too. Because, I mean, I know we keep on dancing around. So this epilogue, he takes... I mean, this is, again...

What I think is the master stroke of this movie, where he says, I think Zack Snyder says, hey, you know the character that is universally hated the most in the DCU? I'm going to put him in this movie and make him palatable. Like, that to me felt like the biggest fuck you. It's not a fuck you to Joss Whedon. It's a fuck you to, like, I don't know, every, like, it's almost like...

I am the rightful heir. Like, it's like he has come home to roost by putting Jared Leto in this thing and directing him the way he does and giving that scene between the two of them. Let's say, though, this is fundamentally, for all intents and purposes, a different character, right? Like, not only has he so thoroughly changed the look of this character, got rid of all the visual stuff, which is the easiest stuff to clown on. He's no longer an evil club owner or whatever.

Right, but also he's no longer covered in tattoos. He doesn't have to be damaged in the grill and shit. He doesn't look like he's a DJ at all. Right, and Leto has a different energy. He's doing a different voice. It feels like Snyder going, I'm going to just reset and give you another chance to play the Joker. Is there anything you want to do differently? He saves Jared Leto in this whole mix. He's like, I'm going to bring you back in in my rebirth moment.

I'm saving you. It's a very selfless act in a way. Yeah, it is dangerous. Can I ask you guys a question? In that scene, in that team up that we see in this dystopian future that, for all intents and purposes, would have been, I'm assuming, the next movie. And you can tell, like, you can tell how...

on board Ben Affleck is for the potential of what could have been simply because he shows up for all of this reshoot. Yeah. He's the, he's, he commits to doing all of these extra days to just shoot this stuff. Anyway, when that team, when they kind of run through that team and death strokes on that team and Joker's in there. And so it's, it is a, it is, yeah, it's a suicide squad ask. Yes, exactly. Yeah.

group of heroes and villains. Was that Flash Ezra Miller? Yes. It was. Okay. He has his time travel armor. That's the costume he wore in Batman v Superman, right? That's how he looks in that weird dream sequence where he comes back to life. That's what I wanted to make because I was like, are they intimating that this is a different Flash? But okay, that makes sense. That's fine. Okay.

Wait, this is the question I was kind of wanting to ask. Say this movie comes out in a three-hour cut. It's this movie, a little chopped down. That's all. I'm sorry about the Icelandic folk song, Jason, but I'm just saying. That's still your cut, David? Just give me a second here. Comes out in 2017. I think this movie would have gotten fairly bad reviews and...

I think it would have a similar box office performance. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Like, I think that people in 2017 would have been like, no, we don't like this tone. Like, we already told you you're doubling down on it. Like, there would have been a little more pushback. It's setting up a future apocalypse. Then the Flash is going to have to travel through time to save it, which is something Marvel literally does.

like right around the same time with their universe. I think people would have rejected it. I think the time...

You know, the sort of Snyder weird kind of transformation into an underdog. Same with Affleck. Same with like a lot of the people in this movie. Like people kind of have come around on Henry Cavill a lot more. The Ray Fisher stuff, obviously. There's just a lot of rooting for this movie. Yeah, exactly. It's so crazy. But I went in also going like, I'm not a fan of...

like I did not like Batman V Superman. I watched Justice League. I found it to be boring. Like, and I was, and we picked it for this podcast before it came out because it was like, it will be an interesting conversation on whatever, like on this level or it was terrible. Right. Right. Right. But so I guess I'm saying is like, I did go in,

Maybe leaning more towards critical, less towards like I was like, how could this possibly be good? How could it be good? But then how I saw it was good. I agree with you, though. I don't think this hits in the theater, but it's like I didn't go in 2017. Here's what I'll say. I'll say on top of that.

You know, yes, 2017, one year into the Trump presidency, like do not even like are we going to want this dystopian worldview? And the answer is categorically no. We don't want like this. I think the only reason any of us are reacting positively to it at all is simply because it's an improvement on something that was.

Legitimately, unintelligibly, very bad. The framing helps this movie in so many ways. It absolutely does. Not just when we're seeing it, how much emotionality has built up in multiple different storylines of people working on the movie, the warranted Whedon backlash, like all these sorts of things.

Also, it's literally I just think the way he presents this movie, the fact that it's on HBO Max after a year of lockdown, we all haven't seen. Which is one of the only reasons I really think this movie got to be made in this form. A hundred percent. They had it. They had a multi-million. Yeah, right. That they were like, we need to drive subscribers to HBO Max. And also we can't produce that much. We're willing to put 70 million dollars into something that will function like a blockbuster.

Whereas before, I think we would have been lucky if we had gotten a release that was more like the Richard Donner Superman 2 cut, where it's like, oh, we're giving you an indication of what it could have looked like, but none of this is really finished. What I feel like, though, is whether it was in 2017, right now, you're right, we're all predisposed to look more favorably on this. In 2017, I would have been surprised

so disappointed because for me, this, this doesn't look like my understanding of the justice league. This, these are movies like, like, like it's no, what's, what's absolutely categorically true in all of these instances is every time they are showing Themyscira, it's fantastic because they're,

Zack Snyder's style works because it looks like 300. Yeah. It works so well in that hand-to-hand armored kind of individualized combat. And...

Once they get into all of the cities, all of the destruction, all of the death, all of the grief and mourning, once all of these characters are killing people, they are responsible for near genocides. These are... The characters are so dark, dystopian, and...

suffused with his Ayn Randian kind of nihilistic worldview that like, I don't, I didn't want it then. And I'm certain I wouldn't have wanted even a coherent three hour cut of this. I would have been like, yeah, the movie made sense, but I didn't enjoy it. But can I, maybe let me offer this. I think we also, and again, the 2017 version, I agree with everything we were saying, but I also believe that I don't know that,

And this is a weird thing to say. Maybe so jump on me if I'm saying it the wrong way. I think you can be a great filmmaker who also is better served in a world like HBO Max. Like you don't have to. And there's something about that where I'm like, like Damon Lindelof doing The Watchman, like he could only tell that story on HBO. I love The Watchman, but that's not a movie, right? Like-

And this is not a movie. It is, but it's something different. The framing also helps with literally putting in the chapter titles, having it be so egregiously long, putting it in a weird aspect ratio. It does feel like all of this stuff is sort of laying out the track of, you need to view this differently. This is the very weird specific...

I kept on thinking about watching this movie and being so surprised that I was sort of being won over by it. And I do want to say, I mean, to Jason's point, like a thing I just categorically hate in this movie is just how fucking gray it is. Like watching the Whedon cut, I was like, this is the,

absolute worst execution of more what I would want a Justice League movie to be versus this movie, which is like the best execution of what I don't necessarily want out of a Justice League movie. But I have to respect it more. And you look at like the original trailers for Justice League, the color timing is right in the middle. And then when Whedon came on, brightened everything, saturated the colors. And then when Snyder took back over, it went back down to grayscale.

I hate that Steppenwolf is gray, that all the parademons are gray, that most of the team is gray, that they fight in an underground pipeline that's gray, and the final battle happens in a city that's gray. Like, it's just... Right, whereas the Weedon movie, it's a city that's red. Right. Yeah, and Superman puts on a suit that is black. Right. Black with a gray hat. Why would you change that? Why would you change that fucking suit? Like, why would you put it... It's such a great moment.

And yeah, it's like, it's so, it speaks to the character. I love, look, I like all these characters more, but again, I think it all just goes to,

He's telling a large scale HBO miniseries. He's telling a different thing. Not for nothing. He's about, they're about to release a black and white version of the Snyder. Once again, I'm, I'm sort of just like, I guess that's better. Like, I just want him to go all the way with all this fucking do your thing. Like, do that. I think we like he, they're trying to like Warner Brothers,

It seems like Warner Brothers is putting people in a box and what they have found is... A mother box. A mother box. Is that it doesn't work. It's like when you put Todd... Like, let Todd Phelps make his Joker. You didn't want to make that. It gets Academy Awards. And I'm not talking about the quality of that movie or whatever. But you want to... You know, you make your Aquaman. You let your... You let everyone... And I think Margot Robbie, as much as... Is it Kathy Yan who made Birds of Prey? Yes. I think Margot Robbie is...

is so held onto that character as much as I think they take control and they're like, this is the story that we want to tell. And everything starts to feel like there's more ownership. And that's when Marvel works. Like Marvel works with

It doesn't work with this is what Marvel is doing. We need to copy this. It needs to be two hours. It needs to be that. This is another framing thing that I think helps this movie a lot now versus watching it four years ago. Right. Which is DC has, I think, very wisely decided their approaches. We're going to do the anti Marvel. We cannot do this unified thing. What we're going to do is anything goes. We'll have five versions of the same character. Right.

between TV and animation and movies at the same time. It doesn't matter, right? Like, let's just own the variety of these characters, which it's a thing. It's like comic books. Right, you go on the shelves and it's like there are four different Batman titles. They're all written by different people and different artists and one of them's for kids and one of them's like a Vertigo title or whatever. Like, do that. Throw caution to the wind. I think I was bummed out with these Snyder movies when they came out because I was like,

these are going to be the versions of Superman and Batman for a generation. Aside from the fact that it felt kind of like gatekeepy to make these versions of these characters that are fundamentally not for kids, right? Like that are so in your face, like...

This is intense. This is not for fucking kids. And not only that, I wish it was rated R. I fucking resent you babies. I think you're really right. That's the bummer with, you know, Batman v Superman is like Batman and Superman are responsible, are murderers. Right. Batman and Superman are straight up murderers. They're also like sad assholes. Yes. And they are all of them.

confronting the issues of adults right they are all confronting the issues of adults or god they're also movies that feel like fundamentally they would be boring to children like it's not above them or scary right but now you know you watch this like five years later and you're like well this is zach snyder's justice league this is a variety of real estate it's not it's not

The variety is making it maybe... So maybe that's what it is. We have now accepted that you can have the hilarious Harley Quinn animated show. You can have all these things that... Yeah, so funny. So great. That can live...

Yeah, maybe that is also the case. That's huge for me.

They've had success, but you can also live in Zack Snyder's world, but he's not the Feige because there isn't a Feige. There doesn't need to be a Feige. That's the other thing. Right. Like, A, there's more diversity in how these characters get represented in different mediums. He's no longer claiming squatters rights over I get to be the only person doing Superman and Batman and everything.

And then the second thing is the movies have broken out of this so much that you're like, this is no longer casting a shadow over everything. If Shazam can exist and be that cartoonish, then I don't care if Snyder makes his movies this bleak. But the thing I keep thinking about is I have a friend named Christopher Compton who has been writing this like fantasy universe since he was like 10 years old. It's what he would write in school when he was bored and

And it's like all like his whole life experiences, relationship to his parents and stuff. He's just been working on it for like decades. Right. And once a year, he'll like have a party during the summer. I just follow me here for five seconds where he like stands in front of a captive audience and he tries to explain the universe as much as he can.

Right. And people go like, so who's that person? And he goes like, OK. And he's like chain smoking. Right. And he's sort of like gesturing like there's a map.

And I got invited to one of these once. And I said to my friend, like, this thing's fucking amazing. He has to write a book. And it's like, it's impossible. He can't do it. This doesn't exist in any linear narrative form. This is this like wide ranging sort of like idea. So it's an oral history. It's an oral history of a universe that doesn't exist. And fundamentally, the only form it can exist in is this guy in a backyard chain smoking trying to conquer like 10 percent of it.

Like every time he does this, only 10% of it gets covered. And it's decided by what people are asking him to focus on, right? Oh, I love this. And there's a period of it where you're just like, the only way this can exist is in this, there's no way you could,

wiggle this into a book or even a book series. Or it's like, it has to be like, it has to be this, this explosion over multiple books and thousands of pages. And, and, you know, it's, it's even like, you know, Tolkien with the, like, you know, the similar, uh, similarion or whatever. And this movie is the same thing where it's like, it's still only one third of the movie he wanted to make at twice the length

of what DC wanted for one movie. And the thing doesn't really function like a movie. It doesn't have traditional narrative. Well, I mean, did any of us watch it straight through? I could not. No, no, I did. But I really zoned out for the last 45 minutes and then rewatch every time there was a chapter break. I took that opportunity to stop, go do something, whatever. Come back. Started. I fell asleep. Sometimes I started watching it late at night. I fell asleep.

sleep, but I fell asleep because there is like, I was watching it late at night, but like it does, I think require, uh,

Like a reset. And I think those breaks are in there for a reason because it can get like, I know this is like, we're saying, I'm saying two things out of the side of my mouth. It's like, it can get numbing at a certain point too, because it is like, it is a sort of, but I think the refreshing, I, when I watch it more like what you said, Jason, where I took breaks in between chapters, I was like, oh, I can, I can enjoy this 40 minutes for, it's basically enjoying like three 40 minute movies. And it feels incredibly digestible that way, but almost insurmountable to,

And like, okay, more sumo, more this, more music, more that. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

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Visit HighFiveCasino.com. High Five Casino. No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited by law. Must be 21 years or older. Terms and conditions apply. So the one thing I want to bring up to you all is what I have found a little bit on our How Did This Get Made Discord. And I made a post about the Snyder Cut. And I found this to be true as well. This is a 50-50 movie. People love it or they hate it. And I want to acknowledge that.

that other percent, people who probably already tuned out by this point, but the hate for this movie, this Snyder Cut film is real. Like, and I want to also remember, like, how do we even, like, I don't know if I totally get it. Do you feel like that hate, I mean, I just am curious because I haven't looked at it or anything, but do you feel like that hate is basically hatred towards why we have the Snyder Cut more about

how the toxic fandom kind of needled and cajoled and threatened and bullied its way into getting this movie released? Or is it, I watched this, I hated it? Like, this is like...

you know, people hate the introduction of the flash scene, you know? Oh, see, that was, I was blown. Okay. So that's a perfect example of, I was blown away that they took that scene out. There's the introduction to the flash scene.

Also, I want to, because David has it as his background, so I want to call it out. This movie fully rips off the idea of pocket dogs that I pioneered on the TV show The League. The Flash takes a hot dog out of midair, puts it in his pocket for later, i.e. a pocket dog. You're welcome, David.

Zack Snyder. I guess you can steal from the best. But that scene is such a good, incredible set piece to introduce us to this new character. I was blown out that they took it out. You've got also Kiersey Clemons as Iris West. Was amazing as Iris. Very nice little performance. Who is now coming back, right? Because, I mean, there were like two new stories last week. She's cast in the Flash movie. She is coming back for the Flash movie, but Crudup is not.

Weird. Oh, is that right? Yeah. Okay. I don't know what happened there. Yeah. But what I was going to say is like, here's a great explanation of why some people hate this movie, right? Snyder is just so specific in what he does. It's one of the reasons I rewatched Dawn of the Dead this last week, because that's very much my favorite movie of his. But that's the one movie where it's like,

It's a James Gunn script. It's got all this James Gunn in it, and he was very much a director for hire trying to show off and do a snazzy job, but it's not a movie that's in the same way as, I would argue, pretty much every other film in his filmography so far.

So reflective of his worldview and all of his aesthetic interests. Right. And I just feel like when you make choices this specific, it's going to piss some people off, which it generally has for me. I just go like this guy's not my flavor. Right. But you get to a scene like that, which is like really good in and of itself is really kind of elegant character development introduction. Right.

But like you can start pulling apart threads of just like and this is a thought I kept on having. The guy fucking loves slow-mo, right? He just thinks everything looks cooler in slow-mo. He cannot resist but use it anytime. He also uses snow-mo. He uses snow-mo as well.

Yeah. Which is when he puts snow into the movie. There's just there's just inexplicably snow inside of the set piece. Right. Yeah. But you realize like, OK, strategically, if you've decided that the way you're going to visualize the Flash's powers is.

is that he goes into slow motion, right? That everything is slowed down around him. You have the lightning. Then maybe don't use slow-mo the rest of the movie. Maybe that's the visual language you've decided on. That's the visual power set for this character. Maybe you can't do it every time Connie Nielsen fucking takes her sword out. Well, then what you have then is essentially what, you know, and they cheat it, but any sequence that has slow-mo as a part of it

in which the Flash is also inside that sequence, I believe the Flash should appear as though he's either at a complete standstill or he should be invisible. Yes. Yeah. Like...

He should appear to be actually at a complete standstill because of the double combination of the visual language of the flash is slow motion and the language of the film is slow motion. So it should appear as though he's just standing stock still. But that's why it is easy to hate this movie because you start pulling at any one thread like this and it all just kind of complies.

Well, I guess you're right. Well, it's like that idea that the Atlanteans can only talk to each other if they create an air bubble around themselves so that they can use their vocal cords. Wait, what? You know, so they, which they dumped for Aquaman wisely. Like there's stuff like that that they dumped for. There's the thing. There's certain, like there's this moment I saw sort of going around on Twitter and it is hilarious. When Superman returns, Snyder cuts to the cop pulling his gun off.

Like going like, wait a second. I'm like, is your plan? One, why are you pulling a gun? Two, your plan is to shoot Superman? Like, you know, like, yeah, you literally are. You literally are the security guard guarding Superman's memorial. So you would arguably know more about anyone. Like, yeah. Right. Like, so you also understand that he has these powers that are pretty amazing. Yeah.

He has people make choices every step. Every character makes choices. When Joe Morton, like when he and Cyborg are having their kind of back and forth and Joe Morton is like, don't you understand? I've given you all of this power. I've given you all this access. There's so much you can do. You've barely scratched the surface of what you could do. He says, you have access to the entire nuclear arsenal. I was like, wait, what?

Okay. Why? Wait, Joe Morton, why did you do that? You have an angry teenager. This kid is very unstable right now based on what you've put him through. Put some fucking parental locks on there, Joe Morton. Speaking about losing a shirt and putting a shirt on, Cyborg is dropping that sweatshirt off and on. How many Gotham sweatshirts does he have? Hoodies does he have? There is a sequence in this movie that if you're talking about this as being a 50-50 thing,

where Cyborg sees a poor family in need at the ATM and uses his cyborg powers to give them money. And I've seen people say, like, this was one of my favorite parts of the movie. I love that this was included. I've seen people say, like, that was so dumb. What the hell is going on in that sequence? And I kind of came down on both sides. Or, like, on one side, I kind of... I just generally liked, obviously, that this movie...

actually give cyborg an arc and lots to do and like you say he's kind of the heart of the movie and his whole relationship with everyone is very crucial but at the same time i'm also like wait he can redistribute wealth are we yeah why even care about steppenwolf just work on that don't

Don't even go to fucking Moscow or wherever. Just wait a second, cyborg. How powerful are you? Yeah, it really does. It makes us understand, though, that like I guess what we're to understand is like he's still just a teenager. Right. And so he's like, you know, he's dipping his toe. Are you saying that it's easier? Well, the movie says it's.

It is easier for Cyborg to redistribute wealth than to fix Batman's plane. Correct. Because that one takes a lot longer. Or to fix a personal tape recorder. Yes. Right. There's stuff. But then there's stuff like there's an arc for Batman's gauntlets in this movie. A whole arc. Oh, my God. Spanning hours of the movie. There's stuff like that that...

I kind of have to applaud the four hour maximalist ridiculousness of that. But I can also hop over the line and be like, right, that's dumb. You know, like I can see both arguments on this. Here's another thing. He puts two Nick Cave songs in the movie, both of which have lyrics that seemingly describe what is happening on screen. Like I remember reading a Scorsese interview where he was like, when I pick a song, it's about.

adding something that the scene isn't otherwise communicating. And then this movie has a scene where Lois Lane is going to the memorial site for Superman and the lyrics of the song are, they said the gods would outlive us, but they were wrong. Well, I guess like, are you, do you think that, cause he's a, you know, it comes from a music video background that he is going, I want this Nick Cave song and then writes to the Nick Cave song or does he, or

Or does he do it like... Because he's not writing. He's a needle drop guy. He's a needle drop guy. And he's also... He's a corny motherfucker. I mean, this is one of the reasons why it's like, you know, you really got to reckon with his work. It's either like very much your thing, very much not your thing, or you got to do what the four of us did, which is...

really try to work with it. I'm a 50-50 Zack Snyder guy. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I'm out. I'm hard-pressed to find a Zack Snyder movie that works for me. I like Army. I like the zombie movie. I like a lot of Man of Steel. I do, too. Especially the first half of it is really very good. I like this. And I like 300. I don't like 300.

I don't like 300. I saw it once. None of those work for me. I'm not going back to 300. I wonder if I went back and saw it now what I would feel. I think it's the avatar effect, which was like the first time I saw Avatar, like, whoa, this is cool in 3D. Yeah, Avatar rips. Again, I'm going to be the lone dissenting opinion that is like,

I'm pretty sure... Like, I couldn't tell... Like, there isn't a movie who has a starker difference between box office or cumulative money made and...

and like invisible cultural footprint. David and I talk about it. Oh, this is a movie that doesn't exist. I bought his newborn baby, a baby Navi onesie. So he can dress up his daughter like a baby Navi complete with tail. But does it, did you have to buy a real one or did you have to make one of your own? I bought it from the Disney store.

The Disney store. By the way, I've been to Navi at Animal Kingdom. It's the best. There is more... Oh, the puppets they have on the show. Wait, to Pandora? You've been to Pandora? Oh, sorry, sorry. Is it the World of Pandora? Yes, World of Pandora. And it was, by the way, one of the best amusement park rides I've ever been on in my life compared to one of the worst. Yeah. Speaking of also, like, the corniness of him, I will say that

The character I probably have the biggest issue with is Flash. Like, Flash to me feels to, like, a character that is, like, I feel like it's a non-funny person being like, this is my funny character. And at certain points, it's a little bit too much. But at the same time, at the end of the movie, I kind of felt like I have a hard relationship with him. I think it's hard inside of this movie, which is, to be very clear, humorless, dour. Yeah.

sullen, grief-ridden. Every character is dealing with essential traumas that have happened to them. Every single cut. When they cut, they cut to another character who has experienced loss once.

or is in the midst of a personal catastrophe. Every single one of them, right? And so Ezra Miller really is the only... The Flash is the only... His dad's in jail, which is bad. That is a trauma for killing his mom. But he, at the very least, they try and structure him like he's a kid.

He, you know, in the Snyder Cut, there's a girl, there's like, and he has barely used his powers. He's trying to get a job. He really is. Right, I mean, they're simultaneously...

they're putting so much on this character because like the flash is the only like you know a list dc hero who is funny i would argue right right whereas a lot of the marvel characters are funny um i'm sorry hawkman is hilarious well but that's like that's like if you get him at a bar three o'clock in the morning he's funny he doesn't say that shit publicly you know

Behind closed doors, Hawkman is the funny guy. Right, but there are like DC characters like Booster Gold and like Classic Man who are funny, but they're outskirtsy. Right, the gods are very solemn and self-serious. Flash has always been the one character that's kind of funny. Ezra is the only actor in this film with any sort of comedic background, right? Yeah. So it's like, I feel like they're simultaneously putting the weight on this one character and

to both be their Spider-Man and their Tony Stark. Right. Yeah. I think you're right. It's just overstuffed. And like, sometimes the character strains from them putting all of that, like you need to be the fun, emotionally relatable. And I think that we didn't try to do that for Momoa. I think we didn't try to like create this other version of Aquaman that was like less of a loner and more of like, yeah. And that, and that was not, uh,

that was not successful. And, and, and Whedon's flash is like an, a coward at like, he's like, yeah, he needs to be like, you know, coached through the set pieces from what I remember. Yeah. In the set pieces, like I can't do this. And they're like, and Batman has to be like, save one person. Right. And he's like, what do you mean? Just save one person, you know? And it's like, no, you know, like, yeah,

It's so dumb. But it's... No, no, no. But it's really true. It's so dumb because... And it really takes agency away from the Barry Allen character because, you know, we've seen him participate. We've seen it. He's capable. The introduction in this movie is him saving one person. And then in the Whedon cut, it's an hour into the movie, him saying, I don't know how to save a single person. Yeah. And I think that there's something about, like...

It's tricky. The Whedon cut has like two sequences where they're describing what they're going to do when they get to Russia. And this movie, obviously way longer, but I understood what they were doing in a much cleaner sense in this film than I did in the Whedon version of it, where it was like also like...

I don't know. I mean, just to say like... It's like the Whedon version is building popsicle stick bridges in order to cut out 40 minutes in between two points. Like, can you... Right. Joss, can you write one scene that enables us to skip over all of this? Oh, yeah. And the Snyder Cut takes that...

40 minutes that Whedon cut out and makes it 90 minutes. He doubles it. He doubles it and he shows you how everybody gets to every location, like literally. Right, and if you hate Snyder, which like, I'm with Jason where I was like predominantly out Snyder.

on Snyder. And now I feel like after this and rewatching everything, I begrudgingly come to like a 50-50 state with him where it's like, I got to just respect the thing he does, even if it's not my thing to a certain degree. But I do feel like if you don't like him, it is probably, it feels incredibly oppressive to watch four hours of this. I wonder if these weren't characters that I do know. I wonder if these were just movies. That's another thing for me.

if I would find more enjoyment out of them if these were just...

stories of gods and, or whatever. Like, like clearly, let me be, yeah, yeah. Let me be clear. Like, like, like Zack Snyder is an incredibly compelling visual stylist. You know, like he's not a bad filmmaker. I don't, I don't like his worldview or his point of view. And so the movies don't tend to, to resonate with me, but I still like them. It's like,

He's straight out of the Christopher Nolan school of impeccable filmmaking, but inside of it, like, Tenet for me felt hollow, you know? But so gorgeous to watch. I loved watching Tenet, but I was like, what story did I just watch? Sounds like you could use a temporal pincer movement. A temporal pincer movement? Oh, brother. Speaking of another speedster. Look,

Here's the thing I've been thinking about with Snyder, with his three DC movies, because I like a lot of Man of Steel. I love the Krypton stuff. I struggle with certain things in it. I...

still don't really understand why he couldn't rescue Kevin Costner from a tornado. Like there's certain things in that movie where I'm like, I get that you're building to a moment here, but I just, I can't, I can't handle the logic of your screenwriting. Confounding story decisions in that movie. And Batman versus Superman, which the ultimate cut or whatever it's called does improve. I agree, Griffin, but still that movie is about people making really stupid decisions constantly. Yeah.

like because they, Batman has to fight Superman. So you're kind of watching both Batman and Superman be dumb. And you're like, well, you guys just have a conversation for crying out loud. Like you can figure this out in two minutes. Instead, you have to do all this bullshit. And then Martha, like, you know, it's like that movie only works if you do it through the prism of, I'm supposed to hate both of these characters. Right.

And then in Justice League, no one is stupid. That is my point. There is no longer anyone burdened by ridiculous plot contrivance. It's like, look, guys, we got to come together. There's a Steppenwolf. You know, like it's a much simpler thing. I feel like he got the note after Batman v Superman. Yes. Like, you know, in a way, like, and I don't know, like, obviously you said that was like shooting very quickly afterwards. But on set, even I feel like they made some choices that when he shot it, that helped the

make things make sense. I will say I was confused when, like, I get Superman fighting Wonder Woman and Aquaman and even the Flash sequence is awful.

Awesome. Like that's the Superman in the flash. So cool. But when he fires his, his, his, you know, his laser eyes on, on Batman there, like, what does he got there? That's going to protect his arms. He's got power absorbing gauntlet. Okay.

Sorry. Jeremy Irons. Jeremy Irons made them for him. So I guess I missed that detail. And now when you say gauntlets, now I'm pulling it all together. You might have been sleeping. The one thing Whedon added that I think was logical is that Whedon adds that it is an active decision to bring Lois into that scenario to calm Superman down. Whereas in the Snyder Cut, she just kind of is hanging out and then in the

she's in the neighborhood right which just did that feels like classic you know script script polishing thing where we didn't like why this should be an active rather than a past right decision that feel that's the only change I noticed I just wanted to shout it out that it's different between the two cuts where I'm like I think

No, no, it makes sense. I wanted to read this quote that I thought was interesting. So Joss Whedon just talked about why he added in the family. Because we could argue that the family in Russia is one of the biggest things that Joss Whedon adds in. And so Joss Whedon says, for him, the most important thing is, for what is it like for the people on the ground? That's always going to be important to me. Like...

there's Hawkeye helping people off the bus. You have to have someone who works on ground level who's taking care of the smaller stuff. And he's talking about this as far as like what he added into Age of Ultron, which is very similar, which is like they have a lot of helping people. The Surkovians, right. Yeah. And so, yeah. So, you know, he said like, basically he brought that Surkovian attitude into Justice League because he felt like he's like,

He's like, I shot three days just tracking civilians on the ground because I wanted to see, you know, like, real devastation. But I also, like...

Like a movie this big, I don't care about it. Like I don't care about it. It's a thing I agree with conceptually that does not work in execution at all. And perhaps if you were designing that to be part of the movie from the ground up, it would work. But in its form, it's just like this is so clearly shoehorned in. It works in the boys when the boys is built around that idea on some level, right? Like

a normal person who's been affected or even that like one shot that Lindsay, uh, Lizzie Kaplan, the Marvel one shot. Yeah. Yeah. The Lizzie Kaplan did. It was like, Oh, well this is interesting. This is like, but you almost need to almost, that's an Island. It's not like at the climax. I feel like that's the problem in my mind.

Well, the thing in Batman versus Superman that I like is that opening sequence where you're seeing Man of Steel from the ground. And it's this sort of like apocalyptic 9-11, you know, thing. That's where Ben Affleck, Batman is getting so mad and you're like, okay, okay, this is very powerful. But then most of that movie is Lex Luthor being like, I heard Superman doesn't like you. And Batman's like, what? Oh, punch him. You know, like you're like, why is Lex Luthor getting over on you like this?

It's literally like... It's like gossip. It's high school gossip. Yeah. It's absurd. But I agree with you. The extended cut of Batman versus Superman, just like the Snyder cut, proves that if you give Snyder a long enough...

you know, give him a long enough run time, the movie will just make more sense. Right. And it will trick you into thinking it was more satisfying. I think. Right. I think it's a... You put more time in. I think it's a magic trick. You give it more time, but it makes more sense. So when you look at it, you're like, well, I...

I understand it at least. Like when I watched the original cut of Batman versus Superman or the Whedon cut of Justice League, partially what's so difficult about those movies is there is an inherent tension based on what is missing, making the movies not really make sense. The movies are asking you to do too much work and as a result are unsatisfying. And these, because they're doing more work for you, fear.

feel more satisfying and you mistake that I'm, you know, you can mistake that for them being better and they are just better constructed. But like I said before, they are better constructed, like brutalist architecture that like if, if I saw it in Russia, I would be like, wow, that's an impressively, that's an impressively solid concrete slab of a building. Yeah. But it's like, but you know what I would love?

More windows. I would like more windows to let more light in. I don't want to live in that building. You know, and that's what it is. The buy in on this on this thing is huge. Right. And it essentially asks like you got to just check your reservations at the door. You got to be pot committed because you ask like, Paul, why do 50 percent of people hate this? It's because if you're not really giving it a chance and you come in with your like my general taste.

You don't have to. You do not have to. No one has to. But it's like if you're coming in looking at it askance, you will find 15 things a minute that just boggle the mind. Like in the sequence we talked about where Cyborg starts to see that he can manipulate the financial markets, the like pretentious self-seriousness of Snyder combined with shit like he feels the need to visualize that by showing a CGI bull face.

Oh, my God. Wrestling a bear so you understand. He also does the same. Doesn't he also do the same? Does he do the same for like political parties or something? There's a lot of weird imagery in that background. Although I did like the way that you got into his mindscape. But then I would also say that there's a way that he treats these characters. And look.

I am more of a Marvel person. I probably in my DC world, when I was a kid, I read a little bit more Superman. Then I really read a lot more Batman. And so I can't speak to the character of Wonder Woman. I will say this.

watching that opening sequence of her in the bank, that I thought was an awesome sequence. Like a very cool, better than anything in Wonder Woman 84. Like that mall sequence. Like if that was, whatever. I liked that sequence. I did find it confusing that she immediately, that she does murder them. She does murder all those people and then goes up to that kid and goes, well, you can be whatever you want. It is like, oh, my understanding of Wonder Woman is not that she is

this kind of a murderer. But again, maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. But I think in Zack Snyder's universe, they all kill. Right. Like, they all kill in this world. Like, that's part of the language of...

I mean, like the, you know, and that is what, again, if you're playing by the rules inside of Zack Snyder's universe, then I agree with, David, what you were saying earlier, the opening of the extended cut of Batman v Superman, which is this, like the movie opens with like 10 minutes of what might as well be

raw footage of September 11th. Right. You know what I mean? It is so... It's Affleck driving around Metropolis as it's being ruined by Superman and Zod. Driving around Metropolis in a Jeep, in a very product placement Jeep, while...

While tens of thousands of people are dying inside of the buildings that are being destroyed by the Kryptonian fight between Michael Shannon and Superman. Right? Michael Shannon? Yeah, Michael Shannon played him in those movies. No, he didn't play Zod. He played himself. Yeah. Yeah, no, he didn't play. That was the secret. Everybody thought he was going to be Zod and he was just Michael Shannon. Yeah, even more intimidating, honestly. Yes, exactly. Terrifying.

Yeah, his superpower comes from the stage. That's the thing, though. It's like as much as he has this sort of like complicated big picture vision of the thing that cannot be reduced to a tidy two hour package. Snyder, for me, is fundamentally a filmmaker who thinks about what is the coolest thing I could do at this moment. Yeah. Whether it's a story decision, a visual decision, a tonal thing, whatever it is.

And he doesn't really care about those things butting up against each other in a way that sort of works against itself, you know? And I mean, in a weird way, he's saying, I think, you know, as Marvel is exploring the multiverse, we are I think we're we're on the precipice of that opening up in a much larger way. And I think Flash Flashpoint, the Flash movie that they're making with where Michael Keaton is coming back as Batman, obviously.

it looks like DC is opening up the multiverse and the way that they're going to be, I think, tying all their worlds together is by saying anything can happen. There's multiple worlds and all this sort of stuff. I think that Zack Snyder kind of is re-inviting himself into the party and going, this is where I'm going to, my multiverse is this. I'm going to exist in this world where I can live by my own rules and it can look cool. And that's, I don't know. I think it's a very interesting thing

I think you're right. I think it's like his ideas. Like they could have a version. There could be a situation in the future where Zack Snyder makes the nightmare movie. Um,

And it's not, it's just, we're out, at a certain point, if Flashpoint kind of gives us the multiverse, then we are, we have the opportunity to not have there be a status quo. Yes. Like every, the Snyder's thing can be in just Snyder's thing. It can be, everything can be siloed in its different universe and they can mix if they want, I guess.

I don't know. I'm curious how they're going to approach this. It could be very interesting. Well, now he's already talking about a sequel. This is the Monday after it's been released that we're recording this. And he's already saying, well, now, yeah, I guess people want me to make a sequel. And so that might be something that we see. I never would have predicted that this thing would exist.

If you went to when I first, you know, Snyder cut talk started, I was very much like, there's no such thing as a Snyder cut. Sure. He may have had an assembly cut of a movie, but like, that's not the same thing. And I never would have predicted that Warner brothers would pony up 70 million bucks to let this thing drop on streaming essentially. Um,

I would never imagine they would have to pony up an additional $300 million. God knows how much fucking money you would have to pay to get Affleck back, Cavill back. You know, like... Yeah. But never say never, I guess, at this point, has to be the... Even though, like, Ray Fisher is calling for, like, CEOs of Warner Brothers to step down. And, like, Ta-Nehisi Coates is writing a black Superman movie for J.J. Abrams. But, like, it still could...

All these things can exist. Yeah. And I think, I guess, I guess like the way I feel about it is regardless of how you feel about Zack Snyder in this film, I think I'm going to butcher this name. So please, all of you are much smarter than me. What's that movie? It's a Kona Kwatsi or Koyaanisqatsi. Yes.

You can view this movie like you can view that movie where it's like, just sit back. Right. Do you mean stoned? I mean, do you mean stone? You should view it stone. But in a way, yes, yes. In a way, like just like if you take your, your functioning brain off and just want to look at like some purely beautiful visuals, see some things. Like, I think this movie does work on a, on a base level. Just like,

I think you could be. I mean, I felt that at certain points it's kind of swept up in it. To follow Jason's analogy, it's almost like you got to just kind of respect brutalist architecture, even if it is not your thing. So maybe just like walk by it, take a look at it, go, huh, that is wild that someone wants to make a building that way. And that this much work was put into constructing a building that way. And then you think to yourself, glad I don't live there or work there on about my day. Yeah. Yeah.

And that's kind of how I feel. Like, this is not... These are not movies that I will ever return to the way that I return to... There are Marvel movies, like I have re-watched, you know, Thor Ragnarok. I've re-watched the Spider-Man, the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies. I've re-watched... There are so many superhero properties, never mind...

into the Spider-Verse and some of the animated stuff. But, you know, like, these are movies... Those are movies I go back to over and over again because they vibrate at the frequency of superhero storytelling that I'm interested in watching. Yeah.

in a way that these Snyder movies do not. Does that make them bad? No. It just makes them not for me. You know what I mean? And that's fine. They make more sense now that I've seen these longer cuts. The storylines line up in a way that...

If he did make another one that was this nightfall, you know, kind of dystopian future or a nightmare or whatever, this dystopian future. I'm curious. I'm also curious for a movie in which the new gods come to earth. There's like, like I'm, I like Kirby. Like I want dark side. Like I'm curious, you know, like there's something there. I just, I just am always like, man,

Zack Snyder's stuff just doesn't hit me right for it. If you don't like Italian, we're not saying don't put an Italian restaurant in my neighborhood. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you about to say something offensive against Italians? Who are you? Mike the Spoon Man Mitchell? What is this, the Doughboys? Is this a Doughboys episode? Can we night slice in here?

I guess what I'm saying is... Are you Mr. Snice? Mr. Slice, rather? I'm combining all of his names. I just think that there is a thing where, unfortunately... The Night Spoon and Mr. Slice. Night Slice. Night Slice. Night Slice. Which is my new Chris Terrio-scripted, Zack Snyder-produced HBO Max movie. Oh, my God. But I guess what I'm saying is this. It's like, my whole opinion on this is, I think, unfortunately, Marvel has set a...

I love Marvel. I love what they're doing. I'm on board. But I think they have set an unrealistic expectation for what superhero movies are, what people expect from them. I think you can see that in the Sony films, not to say the Sony films are perfect, that they have done, but it allows very little... I think that people view them as anything different as being bad, where I think what we need to do is go...

We need to expand this thing. But Marvel has created the template. And I think when you break the template, it's very hard. I think what Marvel has done beautifully is made movies that feel like comics. Right.

Like they, the Marvel movies feel the most like comic books. Like going to the store every week, keeping up with a naughty, like expansive universe where characters cross over and meet each other and blah, blah, blah. That is what they have replicated for movies. But the movies... Yes.

But that the movies and characters are differentiated from each other in tone, in style, and in performance. Like, they're not all doing the same thing. Right. Just the way that if you pick up a Thor book...

If you pick up Jason Aaron's Thor, you know, and you read the... And you should. Which everybody should read Jason Aaron's Thor, drawn by Esad Ribic. I never liked Thor before Jason Aaron took over Thor. Oh, my God. You read that book and you're like, I'm reading something incredible. Then if you pick up Nick Spencer's Spider-Man, totally, totally different. Subject matter, totally different. And...

nonetheless incredibly compelling. But, but, Marvel gets that. Key difference, key difference, Marvel has never let anyone make anything as individualistic as one of the Snyder movies. That's the thing. It's like, we'll make these different from each other, but we're never going to let someone go that far afield in their own direction. it is, and what I think works really good for Marvel is Kevin Feige is the gatekeeper of

all things Marvel. He's the showrunner. Yeah, and we've seen when it hasn't worked, which is Jeff Loeb and everything that has come out of the Netflix...

Marvel world. And it's like, those were, I think, disappointing to Marvel fans. And I think it was disappointing to some of those characters. And it's like, yeah, well, let the person... Wait, have you talked to some of those characters? I'm sorry. Have you heard from those characters? Iron Fist? I talked to Iron Fist. He was very upset. Was Danny Rand like, Paul, I would love to talk to you.

Like, I should have stayed in Kudlin. But I mean, you know what it is? I just think it's like, you look forward to those characters and you waited for the Marvel, like, I think especially with Daredevil and I think people relate, but I love Jessica Jones. But it's like, it was a very hit or miss thing. And I think Marvel has said, I think more successfully than any franchise ever

ever, we got this. Like, we won't give you at worse a B. You know, like a movie can come in and it's like, eh, it was fine. Or maybe a B minus. But I think they're getting less. Thor the Dark World is like a straight B. We're on the other side of that one, Jason. This I will never understand. It's its own episode. We can have the worst. We'll come on blank check. But I would like to rewatch it. But I guess what I'm saying is

And that is cool, but nothing that everything doesn't have to be that. Like James Bond isn't that. Like James Bond gives it over to different people to take over and drive. It's I just think there's room for all of this. Yeah, I have totally given up any sort of preciousness about IP at this point because that's what it is. It's fucking IP. They're going to keep on milking this stuff over and over again. It'll never end.

Boot it every five years, but they'll do four versions of the same thing at the same time. And to Jason's point, like, I love the fucking fourth world stuff. I would love to see a gonzo, banana pants, bright, colorful, goofy fourth world movie. Ava DuVernay is supposed to make this movie and is writing it with Tom King. My fear watching, you know, this, the movie,

Whedon Frankenstein version in 2017 was, man, is that fourth world movie going to have to fit into this version of Steppenwolf and even the parademons and this kind of grayscale shit? But now I'm just like, if he gets to do his fourth world stuff and someone else gets to make a fourth world movie, that's silly. You know, I don't care. Like, let everyone do their own thing. Right.

And, you know, look, and there will always be opinions, which is why we're going to quickly get into some second opinions. The movie was a piece of shit. Yet this person recommends it. Tell me what is the message. That art is subjective. I need a second opinion.

All right, so these are second opinions that are from the Joss Whedon cut. These are five-star reviews of Joss Whedon's Justice League, which I wanted to bring up because there are some good ones. These are all culled from the Amazon.com. Nate Kiley pulled them. And here we go. Okay, this one's written by Fan Out West. Do not hesitate to buy this movie and enjoy it. Unlike the Zack Snyder films, the cast actually looks like they're having fun making it.

Whoa.

And if you don't want to have fun watching a movie, then throw The Arrival or Grand Budapest Hotel in the big old Blu-ray player and bore yourself silly. Wow. The big old Blu-ray player? Do I look like a jumbo?

for the Grand Budapest Hotel? Dirty Rotten Tomatoes? There's so much good stuff here. That's the Dirty Rotten Scoundrels sequel we need. We should work on that. Arrival and Grand Budapest notably well-received films that also were commercially successful. Both entertaining in very

different ways. Like they're not like one film is serious. One film is a very goofy, like madcap caper. Yeah. Well that this is a five-star review and it ends with this line here. It says Warner brothers, hire some Disney PR people and give us JL to, and bribe yourself some critics.

If the Mouse House can do it, so can you. Five stars. Then we go into this one. This is written by Mark. Great story. Extremely well executed by cast and crew. I hate Lex Luthor. Is that wrong of me? I think not.

Zack Snyder has always been great at putting it all together, but I also love Zack Snyder's sucker punch. Why doesn't someone kick Lex Luthor's butt? I don't mean a superhero. I mean a regular dude. You know, catch him in the bathroom. Have him slip on a bar of soap a couple of times. Five stars. Just wants to be, just took that time to say he wanted to beat up, uh,

uh, a baby up like Luther. And then I'll finally end on this one. This is by Thomas Lernahan should have been shelved by the WB and DC when Snyder could not finish the picture rather than allowing another person to take the reins who had no business in the DC universe. While I do not like what Snyder was going to do with some of the characters overall, this movie was pretty good. Five stars.

Twist? A real twist there at the end. So those are some five stars. There has not been enough reviews here about this one. But any final thoughts, guys? I mean, we really talked, I think, a lot about...

I mean, a lot about... I mean, we didn't break it down in the things because I think you're right. This is a movie that can be literally torn apart on every level if you're not buying in on it. And if you are, I think it's a pleasant surprise, or at least that's why I feel. And who knows if it's perspective or the history, or I don't know. I thought, you know, just a couple things. Like, I thought...

Amy Adams just, you know, has so little to do in this movie. Third build. Wow. I mean, Cavill's second build for crying out loud. So brutally. I think that's probably like how they order them, which they got into the franchise. Yeah, right.

But I thought she's great. She's so watchable and she's so great. You know, people are giving performances that are very good in circumstances that are, I would assume as an actor, very bad. And by the way, I want to just call out one of my favorite moments in the movie. I just looked at my notes. Force Majeure, the pregnancy test. Oh, yeah. That was a great prop design. Force Majeure.

Incredible. Really, really. I hope she's pregnant. Yeah, she's pregnant. They're going to have a baby. I hope that force majeure pregnancy tests become like Zack Snyder's red apple cigarettes, that they remain a product in every movie from here on out. That would be incredible.

Um, I, I, it is hard for me to imagine that we live in a world society. Say it. We live in a society that we live in a society in which Diane Lane is Ma Kent and Marissa Tomei is Aunt May. Right.

Like, this is like, I don't even understand how we've gotten to a point where the older moms are the hottest women on earth. And I'm here for it. It's also funny that like Diane Lane is almost going full opening of Edward Scissorhands. Like they put so much gray on her. She's like doing an old lady voice. They're like, Diane, you gotta be less hot. Anything you can. You have to be less hot.

less vivacious. You can't make Diane Lee not hot, by the way. They failed. She is so compelling. I think they did a great job of like, her and Kevin Costner were a very, like, they were not like what you would, they were great. They just look like, yeah, like these are, like they weren't just like, well, you know, they had a life to them. I like Kevin Costner in that film as well. I think he's great. Yeah, I do too. Now on the flip side of that,

J.K. Simmons is announced as Commissioner Gord. Everyone goes, oh, that's cool casting. He shows up in Whedon for one scene. You're like, Jesus, how, why did they shank J.K. Simmons this hard? All this J.K. Simmons stuff must have been left on the cut room floor. You watch this movie, the exact same amount of footage. Right. Yeah. In fact, Ray Fisher said that's the only footage that he, that was Snyder shot that's in the other cut. Two scenes.

Yeah. I feel like, by the way, Snyder. Yes. You've got to figure that he was just going to be in the Batman movie. Substantial. You know, I think what they were doing was what you all have been saying, which is he was trying to build 10 years very quickly. So it's like, let me just drop these things. Like I'm, I'm seeding the world. I'm seeding the world. And, and so, yes, I'll cast a big name person to come in for one scene, knowing that it will pay. Like he's, I think,

doing it the right way so it's not a bunch of recasting and it was like you know kirsty clemons clearly is going to i mean now she's not but was going to be a part of the world no she is again now she is oh she is okay okay she is again now it was like it's gone four different ways but as of this moment she's back in the movie as the female okay so that's okay it's so interesting interesting

It's all weird. It's all super weird. All of it is as weird. All of this is as weird as the fake upper lip on the weed in Superman. Absolutely. I will say one thing, too. One time when I was directing something, I was doing a scene around a table, and I was trying to figure out

Oh, how can I shoot this in an interesting way where the camera's moving? Cause there's a lot of exposition and dialogue. And I was like, I'm going to, I will have the camera spin around the table. I did like two takes of it. And I was like, this is nausea inducing. Like I can't, this is not going to be good. It will not cut. It's going to look like shit.

Just Zack Snyder really embraces that spin around the table to a point where I'm I was dying laughing at how much we were like it was like a merry-go-round. We were around that table a lot like it was like that's it. He's committed to that directorial choice and in a movie that is so slick that did stick out to me as being a little bit bizarre.

He makes weird choices. There's a goofiness. Yes. He's got weird taste. And at the end of the day, when we're talking about like, well, you have to buy into this movie, they're going to love it. You're going to hate it. It's like I think all four of us are appreciating this from the exact same perspective, which is.

What a weird thing that this exists. What a bizarre history to get to this point. Having it at this state in such an expanded object is such a curio. You kind of have to view it on a very different, through a very different prism than any other movie you've ever watched. And you're sort of holistically taking in all the baggage along with actually considering what's on screen. Well, not for nothing, the fact that all of us rewatched stuff

simply to give context to it is significant. I never intended to re-watch any of those movies. No. Guys, this is like... I was excited to watch Joss Whedon last night. I was like, all right, here we go. Let's get into it.

This is like we are all like these are the stories that we're all like pulling apart and trying to find meaning in some combination of all of these characters and all of these scenes. You know, there is there is something about this that is very it's very interesting and compelling to talk about, but.

But again, I'm hard pressed to think if I would ever watch any of these movies ever again. And I suspect the answer is no, unless called upon in something like this to do it. Like these bring me no joy, but I'm deeply curious. You know, I'm like so compelled by the story surrounding the making of this story, I guess. Yeah.

I agree, but I also could use a break, I will say, from the whole Snyder Cut and the whole superhero movie discourse. I could use a half an hour. We did it. You know what I mean? Guys, I have breaking news. I want to break into the pod. I have breaking news.

Vin Diesel's son has been cast in Fast and Furious 9 to play little dog. It was down to me and him. They went in a different direction. It was down to the two of them. How did you not get this part? I worked really hard. Ultimately... Is that why your head is shaved right now? Yeah, ultimately, I think he had a little bit of an in. Mm-hmm.

You know what? That is, this makes me so angry. I mean, and now I, you know, I don't know if you guys know this, I am part of the Fast and Furious family now. The animated family.

world of Fast and Furious. Motherfucker. What? Yes, I am one of the characters. I have a very small part and I believe two episodes of... Spy Racers. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, Spy Racers. Oh, wow. So I'll talk about it more when I can. You know, I don't want to... Again, look, we're in a moment of...

for Griff here. I don't want to rub anything anymore. I should also mention one more piece of breaking news. Anne Cernoff, who is in charge of Warner Brothers, did an interview that just came out today about

And they're sort of asking her a bunch of questions about like, where does this go now, this and that. And she was throwing out dodgy answers. And then she finally says, I appreciate that they love Zach's work and we are very thankful for his many contributions to DC. We're just so happy that he could bring his cut of the Justice League to life because that wasn't in the plan until about a year ago.

With that comes the completion of his trilogy. We're very happy we've done this, but we're very excited about the plans we have for all the multidimensional DC characters that are being developed right now.

And Griff, as you were talking, I also want to read one more quote from that article. She also unequivocally says there will be no David Ayer cut of Suicide Squad. He's trying to leap on the bandwagon. He's trying to be like, look, they edited my movie to death. Where's my release the Ayer cut? And some people are like, oh, release the Ayer cut. And I think she's trying to be like, no, no, this is not a precedent setter. This is an anomaly. Yeah, like...

We're not going to be releasing cuts willy-nilly on HBO Max, okay?

I would like them to start. I would like them to release my cut of Dirty Grandpa. I would like to see that. I would like to see that. Guys, it's been fantastic to have you on the show. Obviously, you know, we want people to listen to Blank Check, which is a great podcast. But individually, anything we want to plug? Blank Check, this week we're doing our year-end awards episode, and then we're starting a little miniseries on the films of Elaine May.

That's right. April is May. I'm incredibly excited about that. April is May. Paul and I are both listening to the Mike Nichols audio book right now. It was one of the best books I read. We actually had Mark Harris on Unspooled to talk about Mike Nichols, and it was great. That book is fantastic. And now I want to dive into Elaine May as much as I have been diving into Mike Nichols. Rad movies. I'm very excited. That was a very fun miniseries. Yeah.

The George Lucas Talk Show with Jason and Paul and David have all been on multiple times. Yeah. A very odd, hard to describe show I do with the great comedian Connor Ratliff where he plays George Lucas and I play Watto, the Tordarian junk shop owner and we interview real people in character. And it has its own mythology. It's on Twitch. Yes. It's on Twitch. Yeah, Sunday nights? Sunday nights, 8 p.m. Eastern Time, planetscum.live.

Okay. Planet scum dot live. Jason, anything you got to talk about in a week? I will be, uh, in a new Amazon animated series as we're talking about superhero stories. Uh, Robert Kirkman's invincible is coming out. I'm so excited for that. It's great. It is a one hour superhero, uh,

brutal, incredibly cool, incredibly fun, funny, um, uh, faithful adaptation. Kirkman himself scripting an incredible cast. Uh, if you've read invincible, it's, you know, JK Simmons, Steven Yeun, um,

Sandra Oh, it's like Gillian Jacobs, Zussie Beetz. It's like an incredible list of people. And I play Rexplode, guys. It's very fun. That is incredibly exciting. And I will just quickly mention that I am in two things that you can check out. One is on Netflix. It's called The Last Blockbuster. It's a documentary about blockbuster video. And

And I am blown away by the amount of people who have seen it. And if you are a fan of this show, I do talk about my Jamie Girtz experience. And she reached out to me, the girl that I thought, well, the girl who I play the fake Jamie Girtz in my autograph signing, which you can hear about in the documentary. So she reached out to me.

And this movie that I did called Happily, directed by Ben David Grabinski, is out on VOD right now. It's super fun. Joel McHale, Carrie Boucher, Kirby Hall-Baptiste, Shannon Woodward, Charlene Yee, John Daly, so many people, Stephen Root. It's Twilight Zone meets Couples Retreat Weekend. And I think...

you will like it. So there's what I got. A big thank you to our amazing producer, Cody Fisher, our sound engineer, Devin Bryant. Of course, our movie picker who we sidelined this week. I told Averill, I was like, we're just going to go and jump into this. She's like, you haven't even seen it. I was like, I know, but we're going to do it. But Averill, a great movie picker, producer, the best.

Also, Nick Kiley for his research and being able to break down the entire trajectory of this film. A big shout out to the ghost of Craig T. Nelson and Kyle Waldron for doing all of our art. A giant shout out to Molly Reynolds, who is my right hand and also a big part of how did this get made and getting the show made all the time.

And if you want to talk about this movie, you want to rebut anything that we say, you can do it. You can give me a call at 619-P-A-U-L-A-S-K. That's 619-Paul-Ask. We'll talk about it there. And you can join our Discord at discord.gg slash HDTGM. It's all there for you to talk about in our mini episode next week. We will see you later. Bye for now.

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