Photo : Mike Coppola ( Getty Images )

This is getting ridiculous. We already know the “Snyder cut” of Justice League is something that exists. Kevin Smith has seen it. Jason Momoa has seen it, and assured us it is “ssssiiicccckkkkkk”—presumably not in a slowly-dying-from-malaria sort of way. It exists, and it is almost certainly an assembly cut with little to no completed CGI and a likely metric ton of pre-viz. But as the gods of superhero entertainment dictate, the fires of speculation must be stoked with sacrifices from the altar of social media, and so today we report that Zack Snyder has posted a picture of the actual physical copy of his cut of Justice League, with the same subtlety and elegance he brings to his films—which is to say, he drapes the words “IS IT REAL? DOES IT EXIST? OF COURSE IT DOES” in portentous all-caps over the image.


Look, we don’t begrudge the man his reasons for doing this, despite no one really questioning the existence of his cut. Presumably, he wants Warner Bros. to cough up the tens of millions of dollars it would take to complete his version of the film, and the more noise this #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign makes, the more his odds of getting them to pony up increase. Hence, the orchestrated effort on behalf of Snyder by his stars, the billboard in Times Square, the weekly bake sale organized by the Ayn Rand Institute to raise money for a single CGI shot of Superman stepping on the bodies of socialist politicians while hoisting an American flag onto the top of K2. (That last one may be more of a speculative inference.)


At this point, we’re curious to see the director’s version of Justice League as well, if only to silence this extremely exhausting campaign. But for now, since Warner Bros. has given no indication it will finance this dream, we’re going to continue the endless future it seems the pro-Snyder camp is determined to create, in which we’re all eventually traversing barren landscapes littered with detritus—like the glimpse of the future we got in Terminator 2, but imagine the decaying ashes of #ReleaseTheSnyderCut tweets and Instagram posts underfoot in place of human bones. Also, his cut is 214 minutes? That’s longer The Irishman, for god’s sake. Is it a miniseries?