The following contains minor spoilers for Justice League.
Justice League went through a lot of reshoots, and we can tell that a lot of them made it into the final film. However, one sequence apparently didn't make it into the movie quite as Joss Whedon had envisioned it. The opening sequence of the film, minus the Superman cell phone video, consists of Batman taking down a bad guy on a rooftop when they get interrupted by a parademon. The bad guy is played by Holt McCallany, who says that Joss Whedon's original version of the scene was played for comedy, but the studio decided the movie shouldn't start that way. According to the actor...
My scene with Batman was originally conceived as a comedic scene. That's how Joss wrote it, and that's how we shot it. I thought it came out great, but the studio felt it would be a mistake to open the film with a completely comedic scene, so it was re-edited a little bit. I was disappointed, but when I got home to New York I found a bottle of my favorite Champagne and a note from Joss that said 'To Battles Lost. Gratefully, Joss.' I can't tell you how much it meant to me that he took the time to write to me. Joss Whedon is a class act. I had the letter framed.
Justice League is certainly more comedic than its direct predecessor, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and most give Joss Whedon, who took over post-production and reshoots from Zack Snyder, the credit for the shift. However true that may be, it seems that there were some limits on just how funny Whedon was allowed to make Justice League. While Holt McCallany doesn't go into specific detail with Men's Fitness about how the scene was specifically shot, it seems that while it was filmed to be funny, it had to be re-edited in order to make the opening more dramatic.
Whatever you think of the tone of the DC movies thus far, there's certainly an understandable argument to be made that Justice League shouldn't have opened too humorously. The previous movie had ended with an actual funeral, and fans probably weren't expecting a funny opening. Also, while there are some light moments in Justice League, the overall tone of the movie is still fairly serious, as such, a funny opening probably would have set a tone the rest of the movie wasn't going to live up to, unless there was even more comedy left out of the finished product.
Add this to this of things we'd love to see in a future Blu-Ray release, even just as an alternate take to see how it could have turned out. Justice League is in theaters now.
