A Zack Snyder DC Universe might not have been such a bad thing, after all

Nine years after superhero epic Justice League arrived in cinemas, there ought to be very little left to say about how it all went wrong. Zack Snyder shot the film, Joss Whedon substantially rewrote and reshot it, and audiences eventually got to see both men’s versions. Any debate over their relative merits long ago disappeared.

Whedon is pretty much cancelled; Snyder has reinvented himself as the writer-director of extremely average ersatz Star Wars movies for Netflix, and an entirely new DC universe is under way that has very little to do with either of them. To a greater or lesser extent, the world has moved on. But Ben Affleck’s latest comments raise an uncomfortable question about whether Snyder’s departure was ever presented honestly.

Speaking to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Affleck, who played Batman, described the Justice League reshoots as the lowest point of his career, but reserved his strongest criticism for the circumstances of Snyder’s departure. The director stepped away in May 2017, two months after his daughter Autumn killed herself, aged 20, with the public explanation that he needed to be with his family. Affleck, however, alleged that studio Warner Bros had used the tragedy to justify replacing him.

In December 2020, the company announced the probe had concluded and said that unspecified “remedial action” had been taken. In May 2021, Gal Gadot (who played Wonder Woman) said Whedon had “threatened her career” during production of the film. Whedon denied both allegations in January 2022, but has been largely absent from Hollywood since.

Affleck stressed that much of what he knew about his co-stars’ experiences came secondhand. His reaction was blunt: “Wow. This is about as gross as it gets.” On Snyder eventually releasing his own version (a four-hour-plus extended take that became a draw for Warner’s fledgling HBO Max streaming platform after a fierce social media campaign by Snyder fans), he added: “That was fucking great.

I was really happy for him.” This is a story that seems to shift and morph the more time passes. Initially, the baton being passed from Snyder to Whedon was framed as a mercy, though there were rumours as early as February 2018 that Snyder might have been forced out for creative reasons. Now, almost a decade on, the film’s biggest star feels comfortable alleging that Warners used a family death to justify bringing in Whedon, who at the time was one of the biggest names in superhero movies (having overseen Marvel’s early Avengers films), but whose breezy, wisecracking writing style couldn’t have been further from Snyder’s furrow-browed, heavy-metal film-making.