Zack Snyder’s Justice League celebrates its five-year anniversary this year, alongside Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut’s 20-year anniversary. Both are triumphant visions realized through sheer force of will and a die-hard fanbase that refused to take “no” for an answer.
Ciarán Hinds stars in “Zack Snyder’s Justice League.”
Source: HBO Max, Warner
The future of DC Studios and the recently launched DCU of shared-world superhero projects is now up in the air this week, after Netflix’s expected purchase of Warner Bros. was cancelled due to Paramount’s hostile takeover bid winning the WBD board’s approval, and Netflix subsequently bowed out of bidding.
There’s still much time to go and lots of obstacles before Paramount’s takeover can actually take place, since the EU has signaled it opposes the merger and might block it entirely, and Paramount Skydance recently put up numbers showing it’s struggling in the aftermath of Skydance Media’s acquisition of Paramount Global. Likewise, internal turmoil and controversies such as those at CBS for example continue to generate negative headlines and unease about the new potential leadership if the company takes over WBD.
The FCC could also delay or block the merger, despite CEO David Ellison’s political ties to Trump and the Republicans and efforts to win them over in advance of a merger. Even a positive process for the merger will take many months to complete, and the merger many additional months, leaving time and room for a lot to happen and change in the meantime.
Will James Gunn and Peter Safran remain co-CEOs of DC Studios in a Paramount takeover? Would Ellison fire them, or keep them but with orders to “de-woke” DC movies? Might they take advantage of the fact their contracts are up in 2027 and walk away?
A lot could happen, and we don’t have much other than our sense of who people are and the conditions under which they would or would not choose to work and tell stories, so rather than speculate about their thinking, I’ll say that in my opinion if what happened at Paramount and CBS happens at WBD and DC Studios then fans are reasonable in being alarmed and concerned, regardless of any early assurances and claims from presumed incoming leadership, if the past and the information we currently have is any indication.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League – History Repeats Itself
If it feels like déjà vu wondering what fate awaits DC Comics on film, and as if artistic vision could fall prey to corporate musical chairs and revolving-door leadership lacking artistic understanding or true creative experience, then welcome to The Way Things Always Are, Warner style.
In the anniversary of Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut we must recall the absurd melodrama surrounding the production and how the filmmakers’ and crews’ vision was interfered with, forced to change, and ultimately derailed in favor of a lesser outcome and sad loss of a more epic vision that could’ve kept the franchise soaring instead of Superman III and IV, which killed the franchise for decades.
Then comes the Batman franchise, and once again artistic vision slowly gives way to studio mandates and corporate desire for merchandising revenue even if it ruins the films. DC cinema was wrecked for years again. Warners had earned a reputation of throttling a Golden Goose to death by trying to shake more eggs out of it. Only when Batman returned to his former blockbuster glory did the studio leadership temporarily demonstrate they’d learned the lesson and let the franchise do what it does best.
But once that trilogy was over, corporate meddling by new leadership once again led to increasingly bad decisions by people with no real experience making movies, let alone running a company that makes movies, so every other motive dominated corporate decisions except for how to make the best DC movies. The DCEU was undermined as soon as it began, and quickly became victim of WB’s worst leadership tendencies. The aftermath was a total collapse of nine straight box office failures and the end of the DCEU, as well as the tainting of the DC brand in the mind of mainstream moviegoers.
It was during that period that the fan movement to convince WB to release the Snyder Cut generated enough heat around the topic that it was obvious a large enough audience existed to make the project worthwhile. After an initial attempt by some at the studio to deny there was any real cut of the film to complete or release, I ran my own endorsement of releasing the Snyder Cut and debunking the anonymous sources claiming in other outlets that it didn’t exist.
As with Superman II, the fan campaign took years and there was a lot of bickering and fighting, but in both cases the filmmakers and fans won out, and in both cases the results proved champions of the projects were correct all along.
In the immediate moment and aftermath, ZSJL served to prove it deserved to exist all along and was indeed everything it was said to be and what fans hoped for. It significantly improved the critical and audience opinion of the project in comparison to the theatrical version of Justice League that underwent the same sort of significant changes and reshoots and tonal shifts Superman II suffered, albeit with far worse outcome compared to the earlier movie’s still legendary status and overall terrific performances and story.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League is the most DC Comics movie ever made, in terms of feeling like the true live-action page-to-screen embodiment of reading a DC Comic book, and achieves an operatic mythic presentation of these characters exactly the way they thematically exist in the comics together.
It’s a work of pure love and ambition fully realized, and I will always believe this film split in-two when Steppenwolf discovers the Anti-Life equation would’ve been a huge two-part blockbuster hit delivering billion dollar box office to reset the DCEU on the right track again, and in years to come the film’s reputation will continue to improve.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League – Can The Snyderverse Return?
The WB merger with Discovery and David Zaslav’s leadership saw plenty of unforced DC errors like shelving Batgirl for a tax write-off, but he rightly put James Gunn and Peter Safran in charge of a newly constituted standalone DC Studios and has let them mostly do their thing, while also letting Matt Reeves develop and create his The Batman saga.
With the DCU launched and Superman a hit, with Supergirl and Clayface on the way this year and Man of Tomorrow and The Batman: Part II next year, and with additional projects in development including Batman: The Brave and the Bold and additional streaming series from both the shared DCU and Reeves’ standalone Batman universe, it looks like DC has a chance to catch up to Marvel at last, even as that studio is undergoing its own necessary course-correction after losing the box office battle to DC’s Superman in 2025.
But now, just a few short years after the WBD merger, Warner is about to be upended again with another merger.
Will new ownership undermine or eliminate those gains? Will top-tier artists in Hollywood continue to show interest in DC projects with so much uncertainty and distrust? Again, the fear and distrust is understandable due to the unfortunate WB history of simultaneously delivering something tremendous and helping create and advance the genre, while then repeatedly fumbling and seeming to wreck their own chances via executive meddling and changing leadership/ownership who derail success with one bad decision after another. Harsh, but the assessment many people come to in the harsh light of day.
In this climate, some fans seem to think Paramount leadership will demand a revival of the so-called Snyderverse, but that has always been a pipe dream and gets more implausible every year that passes and every performer who has moved on from the DCEU. Age, public memory, and the fact any lingering memory among the mainstream moviegoing audience is still tainted by the mishandling of the DCEU by studio leadership, so a theatrical revival would be hard to even pull off and unlikely to succeed at this point.
What might become more possible, whether Paramount succeeds at its merger or if Netflix had won the bidding – or perhaps if Paramount’s merger fails, they pay WBD the $7 billion breakup fee, and then Netflix (with almost $3 billion extra cash on hand from WBD for ending their marriage plans) renews its bid for WB or just DC Studios, hypothetically speaking – is some deal to license the Snyderverse to Netflix or Apple TV+ for separate projects on those streaming services exclusively.
If that ever happened, these would most likely be, as I always note when discussing the topic, animated films or miniseries adapting Snyder’s plans for Justice League sequels, Ben Affleck’s script for a Batman solo movie, and perhaps a few other specific projects.
I think there is still some chance of that happening, but much less so now that Netflix is no longer the one owning WBD. Their working relationship with Snyder and their previous stated interest in potentially pursuing such projects if the chance became available, as well as their desire to maximize the use of the DC characters across all the various streaming and film possibilities, make me think Netflix was the biggest chance DCEU fans had of seeing any continuation of Snyderverse projects any time soon.
But Zack Snyder’s Justice League stands as a brilliant capstone to Snyder’s vision already, and while it would be fun to see how it could continue and I’d fully support that, I also wonder if so much time has passed that it’s outside the window for the best opportunity and outcome. And any time Snyder puts into those projects is time he isn’t putting into new and original projects. So maybe the best thing fans of these films can do is to do an anniversary rewatch of Zack Snyder’s Justice League and Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut, and say a little prayer for DC’s future.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhughes/2026/02/27/zack-snyders-justice-league-celebrates-5-year-anniversary/
