Zack Snyder teases the hashtag hordes with pic of Justice League's cut Green Lantern shoot
When is a #SnyderCut not necessarily the “Snyder” Cut? When Green Lantern is involved, apparently. That’s on account of the character’s inclusion—and specifically, that of the John Stewart incarnation, as played by theatrical actor Wayne T. Carr—was one of the few things Zack Snyder shot for Zack Snyder’s Justice League that he was then asked not to include in the final film. (A scene with the Martian Manhunter appears in its place.) HBO Max has never given an explicit reason for asking for the scene of everybody’s favorite space cop to be excised, but the general assumption is that the streamer was worried it would conflict with its own plans for the Green Lantern brand.
Still, that’s nothing a good hashtag won’t solve, so when Carr tweeted a photo out this week of the shoot—including a shot of himself rigged up to have the Green Lantern costume CGI’d onto him—with the pound-sign-powered call #RestoreTheSnyderVerse, the director himself was only too happy to join the chorus. Specifically, he posted his own photo (on Vero) of the shoot, showing Carr standing in what’s apparently a driveway so that he could be socially distantly green-screened into whatever part of space Stewart happened to be patrolling in Snyder’s vision for the scene.
As with basically anything Snyder does of late, there are some interesting currents of fan-obsession running through this fun little back-and-forth, though. It’s not for nothing that Carr publicized his photo right after Finn Wittrock was cast in the Green Lantern show—or after social media began calling for the series to use Stewart, a rare prominent Black superhero in the DC canon, and fondly remembered from the DCAU’s own Justice League, instead of the buffoonish Guy Gardner. It’s not wholly clear what the #RestoreTheSnyderVerse idea entails, even—presumably a second Justice League hinted at by the cliffhanger plot elements included in Snyder’s version of the first? But people want it restored, certainly, and with such ardor that they were willing to hit shift-3 on their keyboards to achieve it.