One of the many (many!) complaints about the theatrical cut of Justice League from die-hard DC fans was the more jokey tone of the film, which took the characters that previously occupied the grim Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and put them in a movie that felt much more like a Marvel Studios production. This stuck a craw in many sides, one of several reasons the version is referred to as “Josstice League,” but good news has just come from the man himself, Zack Snyder’s Justice League will be light on laughs. When asked by a fan on Vero if the extended cut of the movie will have them, Snyder simply replied: “not a lot of jokes.”
It certainly makes sense that minimal humor would carry over across all of Snyder’s DC oeuvre since both Man of Steel and Dawn of Justice had minimal moments of intentional hilarity. One thing of note however are the initial reports from the set of Justice League back in 2016, where Snyder and company attempt to woo members of the press with their plans for the film. According to the reports, like this write up from Uproxx at the time, where they were shown a fully completed scene from the movie, and in fact it’s one fans have already seen in the theatrical cut, the sequence where Ben Affleck‘s Bruce Wayne recruits Ezra Miller‘s The Flash.
As you might recall, the scene sees Miller’s Barry Allen enter his hideout and, to be frank, cracks multiple jokes. Miller jokes about Wayne’s wealth in multiple ways, an attempt at deflecting what his abilities are by listing “viola” and “Gorilla sign language,” plus the classic line where he accepts a place on the Justice League by saying “I need friends.” All of these were included in the write-ups from the set, so if there are in fact “not a lot of jokes,” it seems like they’re all in this sequence.
Snyder previously said that the theatrical cut of Justice League only used about 10% of his footage in the final cut, so the above scene might be one of the only things that survived the 2017 cut.
All four hours of Zack Snyder‘s Justice League will be available to stream on HBO Max on March 18. The film was recently confirmed to be Rated-R for “violence and some language,” something Snyder previously predicted thanks to the amount of fight scenes and, as he put it, a sequence where Batman drops an F-bomb.
(H/T The Direct)