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Zack Snyder Explains That Enigmatic Justice League Ending
The director on the conclusion to the #SnyderCut, which sets up two movies that may never be made.
Zack Snyder intended to make more DC movies after Justice League. But after leaving the project under intense and agonizing circumstances, he has made peace with the notion that he may never get to venture any further into the Snyderverse. Still—he had plans. Now he’s able to reveal what they were.
“When I made the film originally, it was part of a five-part trilogy,” Snyder told Vanity Fair. His new version of Justice League, which debuted on HBO Max today, is as actually the middle section of that intended story arc, preceded by Man of Steel and Batman v Superman. “There were two more episodes of the Justice League to be shot.” Snyder knows it’s unlikely he’ll ever tell those stories—though, as he pointed out: “I didn’t think I’d be here talking about [a restored] Justice League, so never say never.”
He even enlisted legendary DC Comics artist Jim Lee to help plot out the narrative, which he hopes to include in a book someday. “Jim Lee had done some drawings for me of the entire thing, the entire pantheon all the way to the new Batman after Batman dies,” Snyder said.
Hastily, he added: “Well, this is a spoiler.”
Batman Does What?
Yes: in Snyder’s unmade future movies, Ben Affleck’s Batman would die. Before we get there, let’s break down two deliberately perplexing sequences that turn up in the middle and at the end of the #SnyderCut.
Read no further if you want to preserve that surprise.
The ending to the #SnyderCut—a bizarre dream of Bruce Wayne’s that serves as a prelude to Snyder’s next two films—is a recent creation shot largely last fall. Initially, the filmmaker said, Warner Bros. resisted this addition. “They didn’t want me to suggest more films to come. They wanted me to cul-de-sac it as much as I could,” he said. “I’m like, ‘Look, that’s just not the genre.’ It’s not the comic book genre to end the story, regardless if we ever make [another] one or not.”
Bruce Wayne had a similar apocalyptic dream in Batman v Superman. In that one, a trench-coated Caped Crusader wanders through a hellscape besieged by insect-like Parademons, who make up the army of a cosmic tyrant known as Darkseid. This decimated future shows what will happen if Darkseid’s forces are victorious in conquering Earth. They come here in search of something known in DC lore as the Anti-Life Equation—a mystical “formula” hidden somewhere within our world that would give Darkseid the power to seize control of any sentient being, thus removing the power of free will and allowing him to rule the universe.
In Batman v Superman, this “dream” takes place just as Bruce Wayne gets a visit from Ezra Miller’s Flash, who is using his hyper-speed abilities to deliver a warning from this future: “Bruce, listen to me now! It’s Lois! Lois Lane,” he says. “She’s the key.” Then he disappears. In Snyder’s Justice League, we get more hints about what that actually meant. What’s That Disturbing Vision in the Middle of the Movie? In simplified terms, Flash doesn’t just run fast; his powers break the laws of physics, bending space-time in ways that can open windows into both the past and future.
“When I approach the speed of light, crazy things happen to time,” Miller’s character says in the #SnyderCut. Remember that line. It becomes important later. The premonitions that haunt Wayne seem to be side effects of the disturbances caused by The Flash.
In the middle of the #SnyderCut, his abilities cause Ray Fisher’s Cyborg to experience a similar nightmarish vision. Casual watchers and hardcore Snyder fans alike may wonder what to make of it: A dead Wonder Woman with coins over her eyes, lying in a blazing funeral pyre; Darkseid brutally spearing Jason Momoa’s Aquaman with his own trident while activating the Anti-Life Equation like a magical spell, annihilating nearby Atlanteans.
Then we see Henry Cavill’s Superman, grieving over a charred corpse as Darkseid approaches and places a giant hand on his shoulder, almost in comfort. The next shot swoops low over some outdoor rubble, which includes the dead body of a Green Lantern Corps member who looks a lot like the alien character known as Kilowog. (The late Michael Clarke Duncan voiced him in the 2011 Ryan Reynolds movie, which isn’t part of this storyline.)
The #SnyderCut Ending Decoded
Actually, it should be endings, plural, since there are quite a few of them.
At the very, very end of the movie, Harry Lennix appears as the alien observer known as Martian Manhunter, who descends from the heavens to meet with the freshly awakened Bruce Wayne. He congratulates Batman for uniting the heroes of Earth. Originally, Snyder says, Martian Manhunter was supposed to be a different character. “We shot a version of this scene with Green Lantern, but the studio really fought me and said, ‘We really don’t want you to do Green Lantern,’” Snyder said. “So I made a deal with them, and they let me do this [instead].”
Okay, but which Green Lantern did Snyder want to use? “It would be John Stewart,” Snyder said. John Stewart (with an H) is the character who took over the mantle of Green Lantern in the 1970s, becoming DC’s historic first Black superhero. Reynolds’s Green Lantern was another character, known as Hal Jordan. Snyder expressed regret that the studio prevented him from bringing Stewart to the screen for the first time. “They were like, ‘We have plans for John Stewart and we want to do our own announcement.’ So I said all right, I’ll give you that. So [Martian Manhunter] was the compromise,” he said.
Lennix previously appeared in both Batman v Superman and Man of Steel as a U.S. military commander known as General Swanwick. In the #SnyderCut, this military character is revealed to be a disguise for this powerful figure from a neighboring world. “The whole thing is that Swanwick, the whole time, has been Martian Manhunter,” Snyder said. If the filmmaker had been granted access to Green Lantern for this cameo, the Swanwick reveal presumably would have come in one of his future Justice League stories.
There’s a short scene preceding this reveal that feels like another coda: Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor escapes from an insane asylum and makes contact with Joe Manganiello’s masked assassin Deathstroke, who is in an ongoing war against Batman. Eisenberg gives him the critical piece of information that Batman is the alter ego of Bruce Wayne. This scene was originally planned as a post-credit sequence that would set up Deathstroke as the key villain in Affleck’s planned stand-alone film, as Manganiello explained in detail to Vanity Fair. But even before Justice League finished shooting, that Batman movie fell apart when Affleck withdrew from the project.
Now it serves only to set up that final dream sequence, which reveals that Deathstroke and Batman have formed an alliance in the apocalypse.
Bruce Wayne’s Final Dream, Explained: Just before his close encounter with Martian Manhunter, this is the premonition Batman experiences:
Aquaman heroine Mera (Amber Heard), Cyborg, the Flash (in the same costume he wore in his time-traveling Batman v Superman appearance) and Deathstroke (now with a white mohawk) traverse the futuristic fallen world with another unexpected ally: Jared Leto’s Joker. Affleck’s Batman is still alive at this point. Cyborg warns that if their presence is detected, an undefined “he” will come for them.
But who is “he”—Darkseid or Superman? “Let the bastard come,” Mera says, clanging the base of her trident against the concrete. “I’ll stab this through his heart for what he did to Arthur”—a.k.a. Aquaman.
That’s when Leto’s Joker pipes up about how vengeance has warped and weakened Batman. He mentions the deaths of not only Batman’s parents, but also Wayne’s “adopted son.” That would be Robin, whose demise at the hands of the Joker was alluded to in Batman v Superman. “The cool thing about the scene is that it’s Joker talking directly to Batman about Batman,” Snyder said. “It’s Joker analyzing Batman about who he is and what he is. That’s the thing I also felt like fans deserved from the DC Universe. That is to say, the Jared Leto Joker and the Ben Affleck Batman, they never really got together.”
Joker asks Batman: “How many dead eyes can you look into before you die inside yourself?” When Batman advances on him menacingly, Joker adds: “You need me…to help you undo this world you created by letting her die.”
Okay, that’s a hint. Letting who die?
The Second Justice League Plot
The “key,” as Flash said to Bruce Wayne in Batman v Superman, is Amy Adams’s Lois Lane. Or as the Joker puts it in a mocking sing-song in the #SnyderCut: “Poor Lois! How she suffered so!” Lois was the charred corpse that Superman tearfully held in Cyborg’s vision from the middle of the movie.
Snyder explains how this foreshadows the next two Justice League movies he had in the works: “Darkseid comes to Earth. Superman says to Batman, ‘Guard Lois. This is a war between me and Darkseid. If you can help me as a friend, keep Lois safe.’” In the midst of these alien attacks, Luthor aligns himself with the invader. “Lex tells Darkseid that the key to Superman’s weaknesses is killing Lois Lane,” Snyder said. “For whatever reason, Batman fails. Darkseid comes back and kills Lois. Batman fails, he hesitates. They were in an argument.”
In other words, Batman is distracted, and Lois dies as a result.
“The intention was that Bruce fell in love with Lois and then realized that the only way to save the world was to bring Superman back to life,” said Snyder. “So he had this insane conflict, because Lois, of course, was still in love with Superman. We had this beautiful speech where [Bruce] said to Alfred: ‘I never had a life outside the cave. I never imagined a world for me beyond this. But this woman makes me think that if I can get this group of gods together, then my job is done. I can quit. I can stop.’ And of course, that doesn’t work out for him.” Even without this romantic subplot, Snyder said, Batman would have been plagued by guilt for not stepping in front of the blast that killed Lois. With her gone, Superman is heartbroken and loses the will to fight. Darkseid uses this moment of vulnerability to seize control of him, and Superman’s fall leads to the deaths of Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and countless others.
“The world falls because Superman succumbs to the Anti-Life Equation, and that’s it,” Snyder said. “That’s what the post-apocalyptic world is: Superman just searching for Batman to kill him to get his revenge for the death of Lois.”
In the #SnyderCut, Bruce Wayne’s dream ends with a sonic boom. “He’s found us,” Cyborg says. “He” turns out to be Superman, who lands nearby with burning red Anti-Life eyes. He’s under Darkseid’s control. Now he’s fighting his old Super Friends. That’s a downer, even for a series of movies that is sometimes described as “grim-dark.” Of course, it’s not really the end. Like the Thanos snap in Marvel’s Infinity War that dusted half of all living things, this was intended to be a downbeat cliffhanger that leads to the final redemption.
The Third Justice League Movie
The characters who appear in Bruce Wayne’s dream seem to be aware of the multiverse—and potential happier endings. “I often wonder, in how many alternate timelines do you destroy the world because, frankly, you don’t have the cajones to die yourself?” Joker asks Batman in the #SnyderCut. As the Flash adds, “Crazy things happen with time.” You can see where this is going: the solution is a do-over.
The filmmaker explained that the MacGuffins of the #SnyderCut—the living, all-powerful machines known as Mother Boxes—would have helped to reverse-engineer history in the final reel of his franchise. “What happens in the post-apocalyptic world is, Cyborg works on an equation to use a Mother Box to jump Flash back in time to warn Bruce about this moment, where he didn’t have the courage to sacrifice himself to save Lois,” Snyder said.
We’ve actually already seen that moment: it’s Flash’s strange portal appearance in Batman v Superman.
Once Bruce of the past realizes what he has to do, he doesn’t fall short when Lois is in danger. “So in that moment, he does the right thing and sacrifices himself,” Snyder explained. That changes the course of everything: “Superman doesn’t succumb to the Anti-Life Equation,” Snyder said. “Then the final movie has Aquaman leading the forces of Atlantis, Diana leading forces of Themyscira, and Superman and Flash leading the forces of [humans] against Darkseid in a giant war.”
The good guys win. Obviously. But there’s more.
A New Batman Rises
Darkseid’s invasion, the fall of Earth, and the tragedy’s reversal all happen fairly quickly after the events of *Justice League—*say, within a few months. Long enough for a child to be born shortly thereafter. This is another major spoiler from the #SnyderCut: “Lois is pregnant at the end of the movie,” Snyder said. The pregnancy test can be seen in her nightstand—with a label from the fictional brand Force Majeure, a French phrase that basically translates to “unforeseeable circumstances.”
Her pregnancy is another storyline Warner Bros. wanted to cut from Snyder’s movie before he left the project originally in 2017, he said. “That was always my hope, but they made me not do it, originally. But I got it in.” Presumably, this baby was conceived before Superman’s death in Batman v Superman. (They did have that romantic bathtub scene, which may have been more important than viewers realized.)
Remember at the beginning of all this, when Snyder said a new Batman would replace Affleck’s Bruce Wayne? “It was going to be Lois and Superman’s son,” the filmmaker said. “He doesn’t have any powers, and then he was going to end up being the new Batman.” The Snyderverse would have flash-forwarded to a scene in which Clark Kent and Lois Lane take their now grown son to visit a familiar location. There, they ask him to pick up the crusade of their fallen friend. “Twenty years later, on the anniversary of [Batman’s] death, they take young Bruce Kent down to the Batcave and they say, ‘Your Uncle Bruce would’ve been proud if you did this,’” Snyder said.
“Anyway,” the director added. “Something like that.”
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