Updated with video.
Anyone who watched the four-hour cut of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the one that his fans had to fight in order to get released, knows that Snyder would have explored the rich history of the DC Universe, going as far back as to show Darkseid, Steppenwolf and the Old Gods battling over the Mother Boxes, and Anti-Life Equation. Snyder explained chunks of this when his trailer for the Snyder Cut was released, because you can now watch the movie in full with an HBO Max subscription. But as we learned recently during the SnyderCon event in Pasadena, that was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of things Snyder and his collaborators discussed. But the studio wouldn’t allow it.
SnyderCon was a three-day event held for fans that screened the three DC movies that Zack Snyder made for Warner Bros. We even included them on our list of Snyder’s films, ranked. And after each screening, fans got the chance to ask Snyder questions about the making of the films. Following the screening of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, one fan brought up the long-standing rumor regarding an open Pod Bay in the scout ship that brought baby Kal-El to Earth. Some say that it might have belonged to Kara Zor-El, aka Clark’s cousin. Snyder, however, wanted to connect that backstory to the gods.
While doling out details about the Scout ship, and that open pod, Snyder and his visual effects artist D.J. DesJardin confirmed that they wanted to eventually reveal that the Kryptonian ship would trace back to the gods… and that Ares and Zeus would have come from a Kryptonian lineage. As Snyder explained:
It’s this whole thing with, like, the gods and Ares and Zeus, and whether or not Zeus was really possibly a Kryptonian. So that Wonder Woman’s powers… anyway, you can sort of see where that’s going. Because, you know, the whole thing of like whether or not magic and the gods – there is a version where, like, ‘OK, that’s cool. I guess?’ But there’s also the more scientific… you have a mythology built up of, ‘Where do gods come from? What is that about?’ And so anyways, we had played around with that quite a bit.
The duo also hinted that Ares, the God of War who became a major antagonist in the first Wonder Woman movie, was the one that caused Kal-El’s scout ship to crash on Earth in the first place. That’s a serious gamechanger! You can spot the open pod the moment that Henry Cavill first confronts his father (Russell Crowe) in Man of Steel, in this scene:
Some fans already are arguing about this decision by Zack Snyder, even though he never got to include it in the finished cut of the movie. Snyder put a lot of thought into the mythology behind his DC movies, even though the studio apparently had rules about what he could and could not include, because they didn’t want him to mess with the expanding story that they were trying to tell. Even though all of that now has been scrapped, and James Gunn is starting from scratch.
Keep up to date with all of the upcoming DC movies, and speculate what could have been if the SnyderVerse had been restored.
