Though the movie has a fanbase, it's hard to ignore the fact that there are plenty of detractors of the final version of Justice League, too. The film experienced a massive creative overhaul when Zack Snyder stepped down as its director, and many scenes were shuffled, reshot, or simply omitted when Joss Whedon stepped in as its new director. With all of that in mind, Justice League actor/Jimmy Olsen actor from the Christopher Reeve Superman era, Marc McClure, has opened up and confirmed that the park battle (and his original cameo in that battle) at the Superman memorial originally took place much earlier in the movie in Zack Snyder's cut of the story. In a recent interview, McClure explained:
Zack's stuff got taken out and Joss' stuff got put in. There's a big fight sequence in the park, where Superman's statue was. And it was huge. And it was more at the beginning of the film. So it all got kinda changed around and Geoff Johns got me back just to get me in the film, because stuff got changed up.
Elements of this scene could be witnessed in the early trailers for Justice League. Marc McClure was one of the cops present at the battle near Superman's memorial, featured in one of the cut moments where Cyborg stops a runaway humvee and says, "you should probably move." Then, when Zack Snyder left the project, the battle at the memorial was moved to later in the film and some of Joss Whedon's new elements were introduced.
One significant question raised by this development is the idea of Superman's resurrection. He doesn't explicitly say whether or not the resurrection happened at the memorial in that cut of the DCEU movie, but we're left to wonder if Snyder wanted to bring Superman back earlier. At this point, with the possibility of an authentic "Snyder Cut" seeming less and less likely, we may never know.
Of course, as Marc McClure noted in his interview with JVS, Geoff Johns got him back for another role in the movie, so instead of playing a cop in the battle at the Superman memorial, he instead played the prison guard who greets Barry Allen when he arrives to speak to his father before Batman recruits him to the Justice League.
All of this may leave you wondering why these changes were made, and why Marc McClure was recast in another area of the Justice League narrative. Continuing in his remarks, the actor hypothesized that Joss Whedon and the folks behind Justice League wanted to save the park battle (and possibly the Superman resurrection, if that was similarly lumped in with the battle in that cut) for the second act break. McClure explained:
I'm not quite sure why it was, whether it just didn't work with the story, I think it was such a hard sequence with the fights and everybody kind of together where they wanted to save that moment. But that would be my big guess on that.
Of course, if you want to check out what that Justice League park scene ultimately became, you can check it out, below!
Now that Justice League has come and gone, the time has come to look ahead to everything that the DCEU has in store for the coming years. San Diego Comic-Con offered up a ton of insight into the future of the franchise, so make sure to watch out for the December 21 release of James Wan's Aquaman later this year!
