17. What Can Christian Fans Learn From #ReleaseTheSnyderCut’s Success?

On May 20, director Zack Snyder announced that in 2021, DC fans calling to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut for the superhero film Justice League will get their wish. How do Christians see this fandom, and any other fandom joys, as biblical Christians? Stephen and Zack survey the now-successful #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement, talk about DC heroes, and explore the movie controversies. Our questions include: What is the #ReleaseTheSnyderCutMovement? How did the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement start? Didn’t most fans hate Snyder’s DC movies, especially Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice ? Why is Stephen so passionate about this fan movement? So what did the Snyders and WB announce on May 20? What happens now as we move toward releasing Justice League ? What do you think Christian fans can learn from this? How can Christian fans reject “inevitability” pressures about this and even more significant cultural trends? How can Christian fans accept the fact they may look crazy? Why must we reject the “binary rating” system of review and criticism? Quotes and notes Stephen, Kerry Nietz, and Austin Gunderson versus Justice League (2017): After the originally relased film version in November 2017, we couldn’t help critique it and call for Snyder’s version to be released someday: Stephen: The characters are great. I love each and every one of them. But this rushed story and world around them felt shallow and empty. Sometimes literally. … Cities around them had no life. It needed another full hour. It needed Snyder’s deft hand in the editing and post-production. Austin Gunderson: Steppenwolf was no match for Superman. That’s been the key strength of the previous films to me: that Superman wasn’t boring. I thought this movie managed to Make Superman Boring Again. Not because he was unlikable, but because he won so much I got tired of winning. Kerry Nietz: If I had to name a fault, it would be in the stakes. They needed to create more of a sense of global peril. That could have been easily done with more small scenes in different locations. Possibly those are the types of things that were left on the cutting room floor. Later we reunited to call more directly for Warner Bros. to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut : Austin Gunderson: Justice League was in another league entirely. As the third in a series of dark, somber, mythopoetic examinations of superhero sociology, it needed to maintain a continuity of tone while upping the stakes. Whedon wouldn’t have been capable of doing that even if WB had prohibited him from straying from Snyder’s vision. The strength of Man of Steel and Batman v Superman comes from their sincerity: Snyder really felt that he was making something epic and important, and he had sufficient skill to convey that sense instead of coming across as pretentious. But no one—no matter how skilled—can pull that off unless he himself has the degree of sincerity (innocence? faith?) he’s seeking to elicit in his audience. People say that comedy is the hardest kind of writing because laughter is an objective metric. But I actually think that mythopoeia is dang hard, too, because of the degree of sincerity involved. Even the tiniest bit of cynicism—Whedon’s calling card—will kill it dead. Stephen versus potential fandom idolatry: On the Pop Culture Coram Deo podcast, Stephen and Snyder critic Jeff Wright sparred graciously . We also explored the graces and potential idols of fandoms like this one: I think if we were to reboot our perception of the whole thing, then we could probably avoid seeing stories as either “yes or no,” absolute good/absolute bad, thumbs up/thumbs down, or the nastiness that fans have if they’re for or against The Last Jedi or for or against The Rise of Skywalker. . . . To spread it beyond the Snyder Cut or Justice League fandom: this happens with a lot of fandoms, particularly when the story choices that the creators make are not pleasing to everybody. Or if they’re perceived as subverting the old stories. . . . C. S. Lewis versus making “clever marks” about things: In The Screwtape Letters and in his other works, C. S. Lewis decried this trend-chasing purpose of enjoying anything. Instead, he recommends we try to enjoy a thing “for its own sake,” for the simple (and maybe even godly) reason of finding pleasure in it. His satirical demon Screwtape wrote this about bad reasons for liking books: And now for your blunders. On your own showing you first of all allowed the patient to read a book he really enjoyed, because he enjoyed it and not in order to make clever remarks about it to his new friends. Stephen versus “objective rankings” for good or bad stories: When Stephen reviewed Justice League (Joss Whedon version) for Christianity Today’s website , he accidentally “set a trap” for Rotten Tomatoes. Read the whole “plot” here . He concluded with this: First, we must recall that movies, like any stories, are