Zack Snyder has already revealed that his new version of Justice League—Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a.k.a. “the Snyder cut”—is going to be a four-hour miniseries on HBO Max. He already released an extremely melodramatic trailer set to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” He already rereleased that trailer in black and white just in case there was any doubt that he’s doing art. Now, in what we can only assume is a test to see just how much Zack Snyder people are willing to put up with in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the director’s has revealed something else about his new cut of the movie: Ben Affleck’s Batman is going to say “fuck” in it.
That’s right, America. The thing you’ve always wanted to see. Batman saying “fuck.” It’s finally happening. This comes from an Entertainment Weekly piece, in which Snyder teases that he thinks his four-hour streaming miniseries is going to get an R-rating from the MPAA. It’s not even just because Batman says “fuck,” but because Ray Fisher’s Cyborg “tends to speak his mind” and golden porcupine villain Steppenwolf is “pretty much just hacking people in half.” (In case it’s not clear, this is a movie made by a real adult, not a teenager with a fake beard.)
Elsewhere in the EW chat, Snyder bafflingly notes that he expects his new Justice League to get a theatrical release, despite the fact that it’s going to be four hours long, that Warner Bros. has consistently billed it as an HBO Max exclusive, and that the U.S. box office is so utterly trashed by the pandemic that Warner Bros. has already announced that it’s putting all of its 2021 theatrical releases on HBO Max. Why would it then also put a big HBO Max release in theaters? Warner Bros. is blowing $70 million on this thing, and there’s no guarantee it would make even a fraction of that back with a theatrical release because nothing is making good money at the box office right now—let alone a director’s cut of a movie that people didn’t really like the first time around. We’re not saying it definitely won’t happen, because we also never would’ve put money on Zack Snyder’s Justice League happening, but we are saying that a theatrical release seems like a terrible idea.
But hey, Batman’s going to say “fuck.” That’s cool.