The Snyder Cut is real, or at least HBO Max is throwing a giant bat-shaped aircraft carrier full of money at Zack Snyder so he can make a theoretically “better” version of Justice League, and now Snyder has dropped the first real tease for what we can expect from his new cut of the movie—or, more specifically who we can expect. And to be even more specific, we’re talking about big DC villain Darkseid, the guy who probably should’ve been the main bad guy in Justice League but was sidelined for a lackey called Steppenwolf. A lot of Snyder’s more exciting ideas for Justice League (like Darkseid playing a major role) were dumped after Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice was met with an unimpressed shrug from the general public, so it seems like he’s hinting here that this new cut of Justice League is going to be less of a movie he never got to finish and more of a movie he never got to make in the first place (which, again, is not strictly what the Snyder Cut believers have been claiming has existed this whole time).
Whatever’s going on with the movie, Snyder tweeted a little video clip today that he bills as the “first ever sneak peek at JL,” which… is a whole other thing we need to unpack. The movie did come out. Snyder’s name was on it even if he’s not the one who finished making it. We as a society are not going to collectively pretend that the other Justice League movie doesn’t exist just because it’s not very good. We don’t have the patience or the energy for that, so we’re just going to assume he meant “the so-called Snyder Cut of JL” and left out most of that for the sake of brevity.
Anyway, Snyder’s clip teases a longer preview that will be shown at DC’s FanDome event, and it features Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman very slowly approaching a seemingly ancient depiction of Darkseid as Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor says, “The bell’s already been rung and they’ve heard it. Out in the dark among the stars. Ding dong, the god is dead.” Then there’s a quick flash that appears to show Darkseid leading an invasion—an invasion that looks similar to the one Steppenwolf led in the original movie, for the record. We’ll apparently know more in August.