Comic-Con@Home has been streaming panels since Wednesday, but the virtual version of the San Diego event isn’t the only digital gathering of geeks happening this weekend. Bloggers The Nerd Queens (Cole and Nana) and Wonder Meg organized Justice Con in celebration of Zack Snyder’s long-called-for director’s cut of Justice League, finally set to debut on HBO Max next year. The filmmaker himself appeared for a Zoom panel during the event, and he didn’t come empty handed.
While a trailer will be saved for DC Entertainment’s DC FanDome event in August, Snyder presented fans with a 17-second teaser clip. Now that might not seem like much, but when that footage is of the first-ever live-action appearance of Superman’s black suit from the classic 1993 Superman Returns comic, it’s really everything.
The scene sees a recently resurrected Supes (Henry Cavill) meeting Batman’s butler/compatriot in crime fighting, Alfred (Jeremy Irons). As Snyder explained, the studio never allowed him to actually make a black suit for Superman, thinking audiences would find such a dark visage “too scary.” Instead, Snyder and his team had to use some postproduction magic on the hero’s classic blue-and-red outfit to turn it charcoal black, though the director noted there’s still some color correction to be done.
“I want Superman in full volume, in the full spectrum of emotion, not a one-note boy scout,” Snyder explained. You can watch the clip at the 31:43 mark in the video below.
Elsewhere during the panel, Snyder revealed that his cut of the project will be at least 214 minutes (or over three and a half hours) long. Even at that incredible length, the filmmaker still isn’t sure if it will be broken up into a miniseries or presented as a single movie. He did say, however, that he’s currently restoring the original full frame IMAX aspect ratio of the film, and Junkie XL was working to complete his score. (The composer aka Thomas Holkenborg was replaced by Danny Elfman when Joss Whedon took over production on Justice League following Snyder’s departure to deal with family matters.)
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Snyder also promised that every piece of footage seen in Zack Snyder’s Justice League would be his own, meaning nothing from Whedon’s reshoots would be included. “I would destroy the movie, I would set it on fire, before I would use a single frame that I did not photograph,” he said, adding,
“That is a fucking hard fact. I literally would blow that thing up, if I thought for a second… Anything you see in this movie that reminds you of the theatrical release — which again, famously, I literally have never seen — would be because that was a thing that I had done, and was being borrowed for whatever, that Frankenstein’s monster that you got in the theater.”
Since the project was announced back in May, Snyder has been periodically teasing things that weren’t seen in the “Frankenstein’s monster” version of Justice League. Before this black-suit Superman clip, there was a photo of Darkseid, a Thanos-level villain portrayed by Ray Porter who was excised from the theatrical release entirely. Then came a scene of Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) stumbling upon a fresco rendition of the big bad, before cutting to footage of Darkseid himself.
An exact release date for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, rumored to be costing the studio up to $30 million in postproduction work, isn’t yet known. Fans will hope to learn more during DC FanDome, beginning August 22nd at 1:00 p.m. ET/10:00 a.m. PT. For now, watch Snyder’s Justice Con panel in full below (again, the black suit clip starts at 31:43).
