Photo : Jamie McCarthy ( Getty Images )

Get out your magnifying glasses, Snyder Cut detectives: There’s a break in the case! Speaking with CinemaBlend’s ReelBlend podcast, Kevin Smith—a guy who has no reason to know this other than the fact that he’s Kevin Smith—has confirmed that the mythic “Snyder Cut” of the lousy Justice League movie really does exist. For those who don’t know, Snyder left his Justice League movie for reasons that are too sad to go into here, leaving Warner Bros. to bring in Joss Whedon to handle some reshoots and tonal tweaks that the studio thought would help the movie. The tweaks did not help, as Justice League is lousy, but a dedicated group of fans has held onto the belief that somewhere out there is an original cut of the film from before Whedon came along that is (in theory) better.


Now, Smith says he hasn’t actually seen the unreleased version of Justice League that more strictly adheres to director Zack Snyder’s, um, artistic vision, but he claims to have spoken to enough people in-the-know that he’s confident that it really exists. There’s a catch, though: Smith makes it clear that the Snyder Cut is not anything close to a finished movie that could be dropped into theaters with no warning. He says “large sections” of it don’t have finished visual effects, leaving “a lot of green screen,” so it would be more like something that producers could watch to see how the movie is going than a proper “director’s cut” or whatever.

The other thing about Smith’s revelation is that he seems to think it would be silly for Warner Bros. to not release some kind of “Snyder Cut” at some point, since he thinks audiences are savvy enough to recognize what an unfinished movie looks like, especially if the studio put in a bunch disclaimers about it being an unfinished version of the film with incomplete effects. Plus, as he points out, “every studio likes to make money” and “they do multiple incarnations of movies on video all the time.” Basically, he thinks WB could make money off of it, and it does exist in some form somewhere, so there’s really no reason not to put out a special Justice League disc with the Snyder Cut. Of course, on the other hand, caving to Snyder Cut conspiracy theorists could be taken as an admission that Justice League was lousy and that a better version of it could theoretically exist, which is not a particularly smart stance for a movie studio to take.


Either way, hold onto your wallets, Snyder fans! You might have a chance to pay Warner Bros. for an unfinished version of a lousy movie someday.