Before The Snyder Cut, There Was The Donner Cut
Director Zack Snyder is soon to debut his expensive alternative cut of Justice League on HBO Max. The original 2017 film was a bit of a dud considering it didn’t impress much at the box office or with critics for a film that assembled Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Cyborg, and Aquaman. Since the film underwent quite a bit of reshoot and had to have director Joss Whedon step into the director’s chair for the second half of production, many fans of the DC Extended Universe that Snyder had helped built felt the film wasn’t what it could’ve been. They believed there was an alternate cut of the film that was more in line with Snyder’s original vision and not just the wishes of Warner Bros. They soon started the campaign of #ReleaseTheSnyderCut.
Now it seems we’re finally getting The Snyder Cut of Justice League but it wasn’t merely a case of releasing a completed film that was shelved. In fact, the coming of Snyder’s Justice League is quite similar to Richard Donner’s Superman II.
In the early 2000s, Margot Kidder spoke in an interview about how there was a cut of Superman II that Donner shot that was far better than the theatrical cut that ended up in theaters in 1980. The way that Kidder described this film made it seem as though Donner’s film was just sitting in a vault at Warner Bros, just waiting to be plucked off the shelf and copied to DVD. The Donner Cut would become real in 2006 but not without a lot of work to actually make this cut.
For those unfamiliar with Richard Donner’s role in Superman, here’s a quick rundown of events. Donner was originally hired to direct Superman: The Movie. At the same time, he was already shooting footage for Superman II. However, sometime after the release of the first Superman movie, Donner had creative differences with the producers and left the project. He had already shot some footage and the remainder of the film would be shot by director Richard Lester. Lester would have to get creative, however, as Gene Hackman also left the production, forcing Lester to shoot edit in fewer scenes with the character of Lex Luthor. Marlon Brando also refused to be in the film, forcing Lester to redo all the scenes where Superman’s father of Jor-El would be seen in the form of a hologram.
To put it simply, Richard Donner did not finish Superman II’s production. So how was The Donner Cut possible?
It all came down to editing and rights management. For the longest time, Warner Bros couldn’t use the footage of Marlon Brando after he had left the production of Superman II. Those rights were acquired for the production of the 2006 film Superman Returns, unearthing archived footage. That same footage could then be used to restore Brando’s role in Superman II. Warner Bros could’ve performed some digital magic to place his footage back into the film but the studio went one step further by getting Richard Donner involved with returning to instruct on how to direct the film.
Superman II: The Donner Cut was entirely a work of post-production. No new footage was shot for this film and this meant Donner had to get creative in how to retool the film. Luckily, he had just enough deleted scenes and test footage to pull from to more or less craft the Superman II he wanted to make. It wasn’t perfect and Donner still had to rely on a lot of footage Lester had shot but it was still a film that felt closer to his vision.
The same is kinda true of Zack Snyder’s Justice League. His cut did not exist in 2017 as his version had only made it past the rough cut, where visual effects were not finished and more footage had to be shot. The difference between the two directors is that Donner’s film would be assembled in post-production while Snyder shot a wealth of new scenes to balloon the film up to a 4-hour runtime. As such, Snyder’s retooling of Justice League has ended up costing Warner Bros the same amount it would produce a mid-tier superhero film.
It is perhaps a more fitting title for HBO Max to label the film as Zack Snyder’s Justice League rather than the Justice League Snyder Cut. There’s a whole other movie wedged into this film to be far more than just a director’s cut.
But the one thing that Snyder and Donner have in common is that when fans were calling for the booted director’s to have their say in a director’s cut, those films did not exist. They had to be produced. Thus, the hashtag of ReleaseTheSnyderCut was inaccurate. It should really have been ProduceTheSnyderCut but I guess that’s not as catchy.
