Zack Snyder’s ‘Justice League’ Originally Had a Batman/Lois Lane Romance
The final countdown to the Snyder Cut has begun. In less than a month, Zack Snyder’s version of Justice League hits HBO Max.
What will it look like? We still don’t know, but a new profile on both the director and the project offers some new details about what Snyder initially wanted to do on the film and why he left Justice League during production. According to new reports, Warner Bros. lost faith in Snyder after the release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which did okay at the box office but failed to satisfy many DC Comics fans. They began to put pressure on him to lighten up Justice League with more jokes. And they shot down some of his more controversial ideas — including Snyder’s plan to put Bruce Wayne and Lois Lane into a romance. Grieving the death of his daughter Autumn, Snyder decided to quit Justice League entirely rather than fight with the studio about the film.
Here’s Snyder’s description of the Bruce/Lois story and why he wanted to do it, in Vanity Fair:
The intention was that Bruce fell in love with Lois and then realized that the only way to save the world was to bring Superman back to life. So he had this insane conflict, because Lois, of course, was still in love with Superman. We had this beautiful speech where [Bruce] said to Alfred: ‘I never had a life outside the cave. I never imagined a world for me beyond this. But this woman makes me think that if I can get this group of gods together, then my job is done. I can quit. I can stop.’ And of course that doesn’t work out for him.
To the best of my knowledge, a Bruce/Lois romance has no basis in any sort of mainstream DC Comics story. But ... it would have given Justice League a totally new dynamic and tension, which could have been interesting. It also would have helped explain why Batman was so dead-set on killing Superman in Dawn of Justice, who he sees as a menace to the world, and so determined to suddenly bring him back in Justice League, when he recklessly resurrects him using Kryptonian technology.
Will we see a Bruce and Lois romance in the new cut of the film? That’s not clear based on this Vanity Fair article, which doesn’t specify whether the studio said no to the concept at the script stage or after he’d already shot the sequence. Even if WB did nix the subplot, Snyder held reshoots for Zack Snyder’s Justice League last year, and the new version is twice as long as the old one. So it could still be in there. They’ve got to film all that extra screentime with something.
We’ll find out when Zack Snyder’s Justice League premieres on HBO Max on March 18.
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