DC fans who hated Justice League are finally being appeased with a director's cut to be released on HBO Max

The fans demanded it — relentlessly — and now, it's officially happening.

Warner Bros. announced on Wednesday that a director's cut of Zack Snyder's DC superhero film Justice League will see the light of day, arriving on the new streaming service HBO Max next year.

Hitting theaters in 2017, Justice League was heavily reshot by Joss Whedon after Snyder, the credited director, left the project due to the tragic suicide of his daughter. The end result was poorly received among fans, largely panned by critics, and disappointed at the box office.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In the years since, rumors have persisted about an earlier, pre-reshoots version of the film that Snyder enthusiasts might find preferable, which fans demanded be finished and released using the hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut. For years, one needed only to check the Twitter replies to virtually any Warner Bros. adjacent social media post to see an endless flood of DC fans asking for it.

This went on all the way up until Wednesday, when Snyder announced in a live stream that his version of the movie will stream on HBO Max, although not until 2021 because he's "got a little work to do" on it.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Snyder and his wife Deborah are "now in the midst of reassembling much of their original postproduction crew to score, cut, add new and finish old visual effects, and, yes, maybe bring back many of the actors to record additional dialogue," which could cost as much as $30 million, though the Reporter says it's "unclear what form" the cut will take.

Now, the question of whether this Snyder cut will live up to fans' expectations, or if it will disappoint just like the original film and turn out to have been best left as a vague concept rather than an actual product, will be answered when it at long last hits HBO Max in 2021. But if not, at least the tweets will finally stop.