Even though Zack Snyder’s fans won the battle to get the director’s four-hour cut of Justice League released to HBO Max, it turns out there remains a different version of the story that the director wanted to tell – and if he succeeded in adding it to his finished movie, it would have turned DC movies as we know them on their head. Snyder and his screenwriter Chris Terrio were working on drafts of Justice League while the director was busy filming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. They wanted connective tissue to bond the films, which explains why Snyder included the Batman Knightmare future sequence in BvS, and had a time-traveling Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) popping up in Bruce Wayne’s Bat Cave. Snyder planned to pay those moments off… as well as a romance between Batman (Ben Affleck) and Lois Lane (Amy Adams).
There have been rumors of a Batman and Lois relationship for some time now, with Zack Snyder fans combing his existing material for hints as to where it might have emerged in the narrative. Snyder, himself, came on the ReelBlend podcast and shared details for his Justice League sequels, which would have carried a massive arc for Henry Cavill’s Superman and included a baby for Lane. But during a recent appearance on Pizza Film School, as hosted by Joe and Anthony Russo, Snyder opened up about his and Terrio’s plans for Batman and Lois, why they did it, and why they ultimately pulled back.
As Snyder put it:
The original script was much darker and weirder. And then when Batman vs Superman came out, then the studio was like, ‘It’s not funny enough! People want funnier movies! They want funny stuff in it.’ We did go back and do a big, kind of, lightened the movie overall. … I think, in the original script, Lois and Batman got together briefly. There’s this whole other thing that everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, you can’t do that.’ Because Superman was dead. And Lois is a pretty amazing person. Because she’s not really, her part in Justice League is really… we had written it, especially since I had Amy (Adams), and Amy’s a genius, I really felt we should lean on Amy. Because she’s just a great actress. A force of nature. And then I loved the idea of setting up this concept. It’s sort of like when, in a movie, a husband goes off to war and he’s dead, the wife moves on, and then the husband appears. ‘I’m not dead! I’m fine!’ Now what? How do you deal with that? I was super into that concept.
As if Zack Snyder needed more motivation for his versions of Superman (Henry Cavill) and Batman (Ben Affleck) to be mad at each other. But yes, you can easily see how a resurrected Superman, learning that Batman was dating his one true love, would take that poorly. It likely would lead to a scene similar to this one, only far more intense:
Zack Snyder has been leaving breadcrumb trails to the story he wanted to tell in his Justice League sequels, and even applauded one fan who came close to deciphering all of it based on symbols included on a t-shirt. That’s how thorough Snyder fans are when it comes to the various theories surrounding how his SnyderVerse might have played out. Expect more of these theories to swirl after Snyder screens his three DC movies in California at the end of this month, and use our guide to Upcoming DC Movies to prepare for the stories coming out of James Gunn’s rebooted universe of films.
