DC fans’ years-long grassroots campaign reached its triumphant conclusion today as Zack Snyder’s original vision for Justice League finally arrived on HBO Max. The film is available to watch as a four-hour director’s cut. However, releasing the film this way wasn’t always the plan. At last summer’s DC FanDome event, Snyder announced that the movie would hit the platform in four separate installments like a TV miniseries. It wasn’t until January that he shifted course and confirmed the switch to a one-shot format. And apparently, the reason for the change boils down to (what else?) a mess of legal issues.
Snyder touched on some of the discussions he had with WarnerMedia execs over the film’s release in a new interview with Deadline. As he tells it, presenting the film as a miniseries would have opened up a can of worms that, in his view, wasn’t worth dealing with.
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“Frankly, I think that there was some legal rumbling about the dividing up of a movie into four parts,” said Snyder. “And does it become a TV show, and does it void all the contracts. And I was like, look, guys, I don’t want to become…this sounds like we’re going to get in the weeds on this, and it’s a disaster. So let’s just not make legal precedent out of this movie, and I’ll just stick to my four-hour opus.”
Snyder may have settled for one long movie. Regardless, this doesn’t necessarily mean that all fans will be watching it that way. A few HBO Max subscribers have already indicated plans to divide their viewing experience into sections. Thankfully, Snyder made it easy for them to do that by splitting the film into six chapters, each of which has its own title.
How will you be streaming Zack Snyder’s Justice League this week? Let us know in the comments down below!
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