- Deborah Snyder is revealing more about the moment she had to walk away from “Justice League.”
- “Zack just said to me, ‘I can’t do this anymore,'” Snyder told Insider.
- Snyder also reported an incident involving Joss Whedon before “Justice League” opened in 2017.
- Visit Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Deborah Snyder was in a hotel room having just spent a day talking to journalists while promoting 2017’s “Wonder Woman” when her husband and producing partner, Zack Snyder, completely hit a wall.
“Zack just said to me, ‘I can’t do this anymore,'” the producer told Insider over a Zoom call from her home office in Los Angeles.
The two had just buried Zack’s 20-year-old daughter Autumn, who died by suicide in March of 2017.
Snyder and Zack thought they could handle the work despite their loss. Deep in production on their ill-fated film “Justice League,” they mixed grieving with shouldering a movie that Warner Bros. desperately needed to be a hit.
Featuring iconic superhero characters — Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg, and The Flash — in the same movie, it was to be DC Comics’ answer to Marvel’s hugely successful “The Avengers.”
“We thought going back to work would make it easier and take our minds off of it,” she said. “I think in hindsight you really have to face things and not put them in the background.”
The two eventually exited the project before it was finished. When it was released by Warner Bros. later that year, it resulted in a subpar $658 million worldwide box office gross on a $300 million budget (not counting marketing). Notably, it was not the version that Snyder and her husband spent years trying to get to the screen.
Instead, it had been severely reconfigured by Joss Whedon, the same director that Snyder would later have to report to the studio for allegedly inappropriate behavior on the movie’s set.
Ever since 2017, fans have been on a quest, fueled by the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, to get Warner Bros. to show Zack’s version of the movie. And finally, Snyder, 57, and her husband are set to release the true version of “Justice League” or as the internet has dubbed it: the “Snyder Cut.”
Kevin Winter/Getty
Snyder has been the driving force behind Zack’s movies since ‘300’ became a mega-hit
Snyder, who began her career as a production assistant at ad agency Backer Spielvogel Bate, worked her way up in the industry. By 1996, she had become an executive producer. That’s when she hired an up-and-coming director to helm a Lady Foot Locker commercial.
“We went to this desert and we actually didn’t have any permits for this one shot of this mountain climber,” Snyder told Insider, recalling how scared she was when a park ranger hassled her for one. “That was my first job with Zack.”
They continued to work together and eventually married in 2004. Zack brought along six kids with him to the relationship, including his late adopted daughter Autumn. Snyder and Zack then adopted two children after marrying.
Along with raising their large family, Snyder also became more involved in Zack’s work.
“When Zack was doing ‘Dawn of the Dead,’ I had so many opinions. I remember being in the edit room with the studio execs and the producer there and I was like, ‘You can’t be doing that,’ for a sequence,” she said. “They had this look like, ‘Who is this chick?'”
Warner Bros.
“Dawn of the Dead,” a 2004 remake of the 1978 George A. Romero classic zombie movie, put Zack on the map as the movie made over $100 million worldwide on a $26 million budget. But it’s not a coincidence that when Snyder turned away from the ad business world and began producing Zack’s movies, his next film would go on to make him a star.
That 2006 film, “300,” an adaptation of Frank Miller’s highly-fictionalized graphic novel retelling of the bloody Battle of Thermopylae, brought in a whopping $456 million at the worldwide box office on a $65 million budget.
“She has amazing taste and she gets ideas quickly, which is a great skill as a producer,” Zack told Insider, looking back on his wife’s evolution. “She was all about the work and the work was the most important thing.”
Suddenly the Snyders were one of the leading directing-producing duos in Hollywood. Their stature only increased when Christopher Nolan offered them the 2013 Superman movie, “Man of Steel” (Nolan executive produced all the DC Comic movies the Snyders have made).
The Snyders were now the leaders of Warner Bros.’ DC movie universe as they made 2016’s “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” and produced 2016’s “Suicide Squad” and 2017’s “Wonder Woman.”
It all would lead to Zack helming “Justice League,” the major tentpole in the DC Extended Universe, which should have been the culmination of years of hard work building a franchise from scratch.
But it all fell apart.
Jun Sato/Getty
Snyder learned of an ‘incident’ involving Joss Whedon, before ‘Justice League’ opened in theaters, and reported it to Warner Bros.
The two planned to take a year off to focus on their family following their daughter’s death. It turned into two.
Whedon (director of Marvel’s “The Avengers” and “Avengers: Age of Ultron”), who was already doing rewrites on “Justice League,” was brought on to complete it. That was a disastrous choice. Along with much of Snyder’s footage being pushed aside for Whedon’s reshoots, the “Justice League” set under Whedon’s control had reportedly become an uncomfortable place to work.
On July 1, 2020, close to three years after “Justice League” opened in theaters, actor Ray Fisher, who plays Cyborg in the movie, tweeted that Whedon’s behavior on set was “gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable.”
Soon, other stars from the movie spoke out, including Jason Momoa, who plays Aquaman, and Gal Gadot, who plays Wonder Woman.
An investigation by WarnerMedia concluded in 2020 with no details given except that “remedial action” was being taken.
Warner Bros.
Snyder said Fisher’s revelation was not a surprise to her because, after leaving the movie, she was notified of an inappropriate incident involving Whedon.
“There was one incident I was aware of that I had reported back to the studio right before the movie came out,” she said. “I went to the higher-ups that someone came to me about Joss.”
“I think it was resolved in a way that the person was happy with,” Snyder continued. “That’s all I can really say.”
WarnerMedia confirmed Snyder’s report to Insider, but had no further comment. Reps for Whedon declined to comment.
Snyder said that she and Zack have always strived to create a safe workplace so it was painful to hear what happened on set once they left. But despite the changes to the movie and the Whedon allegations, Snyder said she and Zack never thought of taking their names off “Justice League” when it was released.
“The way I saw it, it was not our movie but we owed so much to so many people for these years, starting with ‘Man of Steel,'” she said. “It was a very difficult time.”
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty
The ‘Snyder Cut’ would never have been possible if it wasn’t for streaming, says Snyder
Now the four-hour “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” will be released on
HBO Max
and in theaters internationally on March 18.
After the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement got so big that Warner Bros. could no longer ignore it and HBO Max became a reality last year, Zack was asked if he would make a version of “Justice League” the way he always wanted.
Snyder said it was Nolan who was helpful in getting Zack back to work.
“A lot of times directors don’t get to talk very often, so I think through this process it’s been nice because outside of Chris, Zack hadn’t talked to a lot of people,” Snyder said.
The Snyder Cut is a colossally different movie than the 2017 theatrical release in tone and structure.
Told over six chapters with an epilogue, the movie has a new beginning and ending. But the biggest difference is it delves much deeper into all the characters as they try to recover the mother boxes from villain Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds) and bring Superman (Henry Cavill) back to life to help in the battle.
HBO Max
Whedon’s contributions are gone, including Cyborg saying “booyah” and a Russian family that needs to be saved by parademons. In fact, so is Whedon’s screenwriting credit.
And despite the conflicting reports of how much had to be shot to make the “Snyder Cut” a reality, Snyder said there was only one new scene. Everything else had already been shot during principal photography and just needed to be edited back into the movie. The gargantuan task was pulling off 2,656 new visual effects shots in seven months.
“It was an enormous undertaking,” Snyder said of the process. “Some of the effects we had to redo because it wasn’t in our style. And Zack wanted to go back and put in some of the early character designs. We really put everything back in.”
Snyder told Insider that if their family tragedy hadn’t happened, the 2017 release would not be what “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” is today. HBO Max made that possible.
“The studio wanted things different[ly] than we wanted,” she admitted. “Just theatrically what you’re allowed to do is different. I feel streaming affords risk-taking and character development and so many things.”
Clay Enos
The Snyders will delve deeper into the non-theatrical space when they launch their Netflix zombie heist movie “Army of the Dead” on May 21. It’s expected to be the start of a franchise for the streaming giant.
Where does that leave “Justice League” sequels?
“I’m just going to celebrate this now,” Snyder said of finally getting the “Snyder Cut” into the world.
“My best asset as a producer is to be nimble,” she added. “You have a plan, but that plan is probably going to fall apart at some point and you need to come up with another plan and keep moving.”
HBO Max will release “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” on March 18.