Late Night Dispatch: Let’s talk about the Snyder Cut

[A quick note!! Hi! I used to write a newsletter, but I stopped because life got busy. Lately, I haven’t been able to sleep very much. When I can’t sleep, my mind obsesses over “hyperfixations,” a term those in the ADHD community will recognize. So, I blog. I blog because it helps me work out these ideas, and tires me out. I’m going to use this new newsletter, “Late Night Dispatch,” as just that — writing through insomnia. This won’t be a nightly, weekly, or monthly thing. It’ll just be for when I can’t sleep. If you like reading my tweets (lol) or my work (thank you, if you do!!), now I have this. Also note that since none of this is edited and is written in the early hours of the morning, it’ll be incoherent at times. But that’s what late night dispatches are.]

I almost wish Justice League had never come out. Not because I hate the movie; sure, it’s boring and unentertaining, but there are a few solid scenes. It’s a perfectly fine, forgettable film, but the longer lasting conspiracy theory around a supposed alternate version known as the “Snyder Cut” has divided the fan base for almost two years.

Now, on the eve of San Diego Comic-Con, home of the greatest fan gathering in the United States, devout believers behind the proverbial “Release the Snyder Cut” campaign have brought their mostly online petition to California’s sunny streets. More than $20,000 was reportedly raised to purchase posters that read “Release the Snyder Cut,” which will appear on billboards and bus shelters. A full-page ad will be taken out in The Hollywood Reporter.

Half of the money raised will go to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in honor of Snyder’s late daughter, Autumn. I want to be clear: that’s genuinely remarkable. The issue isn’t that fans are raising money for a good cause. It’s a wonderful sentiment. It’s not even an issue that people believe a three-and-a-half hour version of Justice League untouched by replacement director Joss Whedon exists, and they want to see it. The problem is the attitude surrounding the original “Release the Snyder Cut” was born out of a sense of entitlement that has wreaked havoc on fandom for years.

Let’s get a few important bullet points out of the way. Yes, there is almost certainly an alternate Justice League cut. This is true for many movies. Footage gets left on the editing floor and different cuts are scrapped. A version that includes even more of Snyder’s input is probably floating around somewhere. Now, more importantly: Warner Bros. has no obligation to release an alternate version. The movie is owned by them, created by Snyder and finished by Whedon. This is how entertainment works — it’s why fanfiction exists for those who envision something different.

But that doesn’t sit well with stans. The Snyder Cut campaign exists because people believe “they hadn’t gotten the movie they’d been promised,” as The Ringer reported this year. Like the ending of Mass Effect 3 and any controversy facing the most recent Star Wars trilogy, people believe they have a say in the entertainment they’ve invested time into.

Throngs of angry people demanded that BioWare fix Mass Effect 3 in 2012 when the ending wasn’t what they thought it would be. Trolls released their own edited versions of Star Wars movies, removing women or changing the tone of the film to appease their own interests. Large swaths of fandom have become more toxic over the last 15 years, and it’s mostly driven by a false sense of entitlement and ownership they never had.

And, like the case of Mass Effect 3 or Star Wars, some people within the hyper-organized Snyder Cut campaign are ready to argue about it with anyone who tweets or writes about the topic. As The AV Club noted in June, “any less-than-glowing comment, Twitter post, or (ahem) article about Snyder’s dark and dour attempt to match Marvel’s lineup of world-beating interconnected film franchises is met with the kind of veering-into-harassment defensiveness usually reserved online for the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos or the Paul brothers.”

The AV Club’s irreverent and snarky tone is easy to scoff at as over-exaggerated, but the passage isn’t far from the truth. People were leaking screenshots of Facebook Messenger chats with random crew members on Justice League as proof the cut exist; every photo posted by Snyder on social media app Vero added to the overall testament that it was real. Everything seemed to come to a head earlier this year at a mini-convention celebrating Snyder’s work, where he seemingly all-but-confirmed that a cut exists. Fans wanted to prove that Justice League, which even they recognized wasn’t super great, was a victim of Warner Bros. holding the real version hostage.

I used to tell friends that people set up ping words for “Snyder Cut” just to reply to any tweet that insinuated it was getting a little ridiculous. That semi-joke only existed because I watched colleagues, random online strangers, and even DC executives face swarms of harassment for trying to talk about it. One DC Comics executive even reportedly left Twitter after dealing with angry Snyder stans.

This doesn’t account for all fans (I know), but the overwhelming narrative is that people clamoring online to get Warner Bros. executives to release the Snyder cut are negatively affecting fandom.

“This is a movement, in short, that has grown used to industry skepticism and online negativity,” Rob Harvilla wrote for The Ringer.

It hasn’t stopped. When AT&T acquired WarnerMedia (Warner Bros.’ parent company), people slid into AT&T’s DMs on Twitter and frantically @-mentioned them demanding the Snyder cut. When Warner Bros. announced Ann Sarnoff as its new CEO — the first woman to hold the position — the welcome tweet was inundated with people demanding the cut. Just recently, upon WarnerMedia’s announcement that its own direct-to-consumer streaming service, HBO Max, would launch next year, people on Twitter demanded, well, you get it.

The difference between all of the aforementioned moments in this nearly two-year campaign, and Comic-Con (where a banner plane will reportedly fly over San Diego pleading with Warner Bros. to release the cut), is the move from online to offline. That kind of initiative has only really happened once before. A group of cosplayers got together in 2018 to peacefully march outside Warner Bros.’ office in Los Angeles. Not much came of it.

But this isn’t an office building in L.A. This is a convention where fans get together to celebrate the pop culture in their lives, to celebrate their favorite artists. It’s a positive force of energy. The campaign to release the cut may seem like a celebratory act to those participating in it, but the movement isn’t positive. It’s the definition of toxic entitled behavior that so many people in various fandom circles have spent years trying to escape. Bringing the campaign to San Diego Comic-Con, literally holding it over people’s heads, isn’t funny, charming, smart, or brave. It’s inconsiderate — and Comic-Con should be a place for the utmost consideration.

Not to mention, Warner Bros. isn’t even going to be at Comic-Con this year!

I’ve thought a lot of about fan entitlement over the last five or so years. We watched the worst of what that looks like through major socio-political events like GamerGate. Other cases, like Star Wars and the gross reaction from angry Game of Thrones fans who worked to ensure that pictures of showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss appeared when “bad writers” was Googled, are just extensions of that moment. Fan entitlement has real life consequences, and the Snyder Cut movement is part of that dangerous trend.

I’ll leave you with a piece of a story from Polygon’s Susana Polo that I think about almost once a week. We can not change the media in our lives; literally, we don’t own it. None of this belongs to us, as much as that can hurt. The core of our identities are not tied into the pop culture that enters our lives. The more we can sit with that and accept it, the better fandom will be for us all.

“Expecting creators to revise work after it is released or even to merely participate in the conversation around their work, is a breach of social contract — and expecting that the massive media corporations behind so many modern creators will do the same will leave you exhausted, every time. It’s OK to be disappointed by something without asking that the creators hand you control over that thing, especially if control to you only means that they have to do it again, in the way you’d prefer.”

The Snyder Cut probably exists. No, it almost certainly does. It should also never be released. It’s not for us. If we were meant to see it, we’d have it already.