New Justice League book explores the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement

A new book tells the story of the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement, which convinced Warner Bros. to spend $70 million on making the movie a reality.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League arrives on HBO Max next month, but it’s taken a long time for the film to reach that point. Beginning as nothing more than a fan movement to release the director’s cut of the 2017 DCEU movie, Zack Snyder’s version of the film has gone from rumors and whispers to a four-hour feature on one of the most popular streaming platforms currently available. And a new book will tell the story of how that happened.

Written by Sean O’Connell, Release The Snyder Cut: The Crazy True Story Behind The Fight That Saved Zack Snyder’s Justice League will chronicle how the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement came to be, how it became so huge that Warner Bros. decided to actually pour $70 million into making the movie a reality, and how it’s managed to raise more than $200,000 for suicide prevention in honor of Snyder’s daughter, who sadly took her own life back in 2017.

Hitting shelves on March 1, the book will feature observations and interviews, including from Snyder himself. SYFY Wire has a quote from the director from the book:

"I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but the biggest, the most volume for any social media campaign for any movie Warner Bros has ever done is for a movie that you guys never released. The most tweets, the most social media noise in the history of Warner Bros. is for a film that you guys don’t have out. And at that stage in time, had no intention of releasing. In what world is that okay?"

The fact that the Snyder Cut exists is a testament to how passionate the DCEU fanbase is, and the power of fan movements like this to make things happen. The director admits in the book that, by the time he left the project, he didn’t have much interest in fighting the studio on important decisions. “I was just kind of done with it,” Snyder said in an interview included in the book. “I had no energy to fight [the studio], and fight for [the movie]. Literally, zero energy for that.”

Thankfully, 179,322 signatures on a Change.org petition — along with plenty of noise on social media — convinced Warner Bros. to make Snyder’s vision of Justice League a reality. It’s not often fan movements have such successful results. Hopefully, the four-hour film will be well worth the wait when it comes out on March 18.

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