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Let me be clear on everything here. I don’t like the direction Zack Snyder took with the DC universe. Man Of Steel, as I said in my review, was a decent superhero movie but a terrible Superman movie. Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice was so far removed from what I wanted to see in a Batman/Superman team-up movie that I didn’t want to see it before learning Lex Luthor became the Joker, motivations for the hero fight were questionable, and the plot goes every which way. Then there are the interviews, where Snyder says that if superheroes were real they’d all be killers and to think otherwise is living in a fantasy world. You know, like a MOVIE! Or the COMICS YOUR MOVIE IS BASED ON! So I was not disappointed to learn that Joss Whedon was being brought in to punch up the story a bit. The timing however was terrible as Snyder’s daughter had just died, and from what I heard the end result was a mess as their two styles clashed horribly.

Now comes all this talk about the “Snyder cut”. Fans were demanding this cut for months, sometimes talking about it in social media threads and site comments sections if they could at any level fudge the conversation to allow it. And then did it anyway if they couldn’t. So WarnerMedia, the merger of phone and entertainment stream AT&T and Time Warner, decided completing Snyder’s original vision would be a good boost for HBO Max, their new attempt to join the streaming craze that has hit the entertainment industry without any real thought. Fans were thrilled, but the Warner Brothers side is not because it exposes some of their mistakes in going this route, whatever my personal thoughts on Snyder’s misunderstanding of the DC Universe might be. I’m happy the fans are getting what they want (if only to shut them up) but the access media wants to be on WB’s good side and joined their trashing those demanding a director’s cut of Justice League. With the original on my DVR (via TBS) I figured why not see what the hype or antihype was about. Is the Whedon-ised version of the film really that bad?

RELEASE DATE: 2017

RELEASED BY: Warner Brothers & DC Entertainment

RUNTIME: 2 hours (+ an extra maybe 30 minutes on TBS)

RATING: PG-13

STARRING: Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Ezra Miller, Jason Momoa, Ray Fisher, and Jeremy Irons

SCREENWRITERS: Chris Terrio, Zack Snyder, and Joss Whedon

DIRECTOR: Zack Snyder, altered by Joss Whedon and the WB studio heads

GROSS REVENUE: $657,924,295 worldwide ($229,024,295 domestic)

ESTIMATED BUDGET: $300,000,000

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