The notion that the Snyder Cut was anything other than a workprint rough cut that Snyder would have whittled down into a normal theatrical length is ridiculous. WB would not have been willing to release and theaters would not have been willing to run what was seen on HBO Max this past week. It would have been about 2 1/2 hours at most, it just wouldn't have had Whedon's attempts to salvage the characters in it, which mostly don't work because they're poorly executed and clash absurdly with Snyder's tone, not because they're bad ideas for the characters. The Snyder Cut makes the thinking of the studio and Whedon pretty clear in terms of why the changes and edits were made, but they were trying to make it into something it was never intended to be, and it was never going to work unless they just scrapped the whole thing and shot a different movie...which would then clash with the events and tone established by MoS and BvS anyway.
And then on top of that the idea that any of this competes with Marvel in any way? Complete nonsense. Snyder had already blown that with BvS when the first live action team up/showdown between Batman and Superman couldn't even crack the $900 million mark, while (then) near unknowns like Black Panther and Captain Marvel cruised past the billion dollar mark with ease shortly after. The public, for better or worse, rejected Snyder's take on these characters and it would have been foolish of WB to keep going with him after BvS if it weren't for the fact that they were already about to start filming Justice League by the time they realized BvS wasn't going to do what it was projected to do. And we know it's not just that the mass audience hates DC in general, because Wonder Woman did well and Aquaman broke a billion in a box office run that must still give WB's market analysts panic attacks about their complete inability to predict human behavior. Remember, the very notion of an Aquaman movie even existing was a running gag on Entourage not 10 years earlier, and now James Wan just took him to the fucking billionaire's club. And it's pretty easy to see what the variable is here: Zack Snyder.
In a world where WB was more cognizant of why the MCU works and how to directly compete with it, Snyder would never even have had a chance to touch the Justice League movie (it of course can be strongly argued that trying to compete with Marvel should not be their goal in the first place but, welll...1. It's WB and they don't know any better and 2. That competiton is the premise of the article in question). Snyder's cut of Justice League proves mainly that he without any question has no idea how to portray any of these characters in any kind of positive or aspiration way, that he still hasn't learned how to edit together a coherent first act after all these years (MoS's is out of order and BvS' first act scene order might as well have been chosen at random), he has absolutely zero concept of pacing or belief in the notion of each shot in a film having a purpose and reason to be in it, and that he decided to bow down entirely to the pressure of his fans and pander incredibly hard and obviously to them.
For all the talk about his "vision," the Snyder Cut is full of meaningless bloat that is only there because the fans expected it to be. There's no reason whatsoever to see Superman stop in to see Alfred - yes he needs to find out where the JL has gone so he can meet them, but there are at least three ways he could do that and we don't need to know which one he used. That scene is there because the Snyder fans knew it existed due to shots of it being released, and Snyder knew if it wasn't in the movie they'd lose their fucking shit over it still being gone, so it's there to prevent them from thinking the Snyder Cut had any cuts made to it at all, even ones it desperately needed to function as a coherent piece of storytelling. I'm pretty sure that's why Martian Manhunter shows up at the end instead of a Green Lantern, too, as a GL would make vastly more sense there as opposed to J'onn revealing he's been here the whole time but just...didn't help at all for some reason, but Snyder had already shown his concepts of MM so he had to put him in or there would have been screaming.
Compound all that with the fact that it apparently got 1.8 million viewers over the weekend, or at least viewers of five minutes of it according to the data, which at current ticket prices and generously assuming each view would equate to two moviegoers in a theatrical release works out to a piddling $36 million opening weekend, mathematically a projected run not even enough to recoup the $70 million plus marketing costs of the Snyder Cut reshoots and post-production work, let alone the reported half a billion they already spent on the movie in the first place (production + marketing). And while 1.8 million views is enough to squeak out a 100,000 viewer win against Falcon & The Winter Soldier, it's not enough to beat the 3 million viewers who watched the finale of The Bachelor. And probably not enough to beat WB's own Godzilla vs. Kong, whose trailer currently has three times the views of the Snyder Cut trailer on YouTube. And let's face it, if you can't even beat Godzilla, you ain't gonna beat the Avengers. My guess is that WB really did close the book on Snyder's DC films with this, but if Flash and Black Adam tank next year, I expect they'll come crawling back to him due to inexplicably not having any better ideas.
