We give Twitter a lot of shit. It’s a hellsite that you seemingly cannot escape, and next thing you know you have to explain who Bean Dad is to your mom. But the truth is Twitter gets shit done. In the past year, we saw the infamous 2015 thread of a stripper’s wild trip to Florida get turned into a movie. The hellsite was also partially responsible for Sonic The Hedgehog’s design being fully changed after the trailer premiered, with people dunking on how freaky-looking Sonic was. But we now know Twitter’s crowning achievement: Persuading Jared Leto to finally make the Joker say “We live in a society.”
It all started in 2018 when someone named Bill Wilson made a petition asking Joaquin Phoenix to say “We live in a society” in Todd Phillips’ Joker. It went viral on Twitter, amassing a whopping 58,000-plus signatures. It wasn’t enough to actually change Phillips’ screenplay, but it became a huge meme. Three years later, the trailer for the Snyder Cut of Justice League dropped and we got to see a different Joker say the line. Turns out, Leto ad-libbed it, knowing it would make fanboys lose their shit—though it sadly doesn’t make it onto the actual Snyder Cut.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, director Zack Snyder said about the line, “We went back and forth a bit, and I’ll give Jared credit for that little ad-lib there, because it was really, really beautiful.” As THR explains, the line was filmed in a new scene set in an apocalyptic future. Snyder told THR that the scene was “based on a bunch of ideas that I had had over the years. I had been planting a bunch of Easter eggs in the other movies that I thought it was time to harvest into this scene.”
They got the meme in, but what Snyder had initially planned that we didn’t get to see is Ryan Reynolds reprising his role as Green Lantern. Reynolds has become strongly associated with his superior superhero role in the Deadpool films, but Snyder still held hope he’d make his return to the DC universe. “There was another idea I had for the Green Lantern that wasn’t Ryan, and so I thought that if we had gone down this path of Green Lantern, I would have had to have Ryan as the additional Lantern,” said Snyder. “Filling out the Lantern Corps a little bit more than, say, just one Green Lantern.” He didn’t specify why that didn’t work out, but it’s probably for the best.