Now Every Fandom Wants Their Snyder Cut

The Snyder Cut will finally see the light of day, even if Warner Bros. had to basically invent one since there can't possibly be a suppressed director's cut if you have to pump millions into reshoots just to make it. So, in reality, there never actually was a Snyder Cut as much as there was a petulant social media assault from entitled fans to get a studio to make a totally new movie. Cool. That's a very cool precedent to set that's already paying the worst dividends.

You might remember Suicide Squad as one of the other terrible DC movies. Some fans are pinning their hopes on James Gunn's sequel/reboot to salvage the promise of the original. They may not have to now that David Ayer, director of the first one, wants his own director's cut release. Inspired by Justice League fan's valiant fight to get a bad movie re-released, a Star Wars fan set up a Change.org petition to get George Lucas to release the 4-hour cut of Revenge of the Sith. This, despite Lucas pretty famously not owning the rights to the series anymore, and calling all the shots at Lucasfilm when he made the movie. Fans tried to prod the last Fantastic Four movie's director, Josh Trank, into launching a similar campaign to get a hypothetically better cut released, which he shot down pretty quickly.

The flood gates have opened. Now every defender of a movie we've all commonly accepted to be hot trash will demand they be given an alternate cut of a film. All in the faint hope that there's something in it to justify the time they've spent yelling about how good a movie is to people who don't care enough to argue back. In the case of the Revenge of the Sith guy, what he wants isn't necessarily a "director's cut" in the same way Ridley Scott's movies tend to have director's cuts that elevate his bad or mediocre movies to masterpieces (see, Blade Runner and Kingdom of Heaven). That guy wants the early, ugly, bloated cut that every director first puts together that includes nearly everything they shot. It's like asking a potter to keep that vase because you want that big wet slop of unshaped clay over there.

What the fans behind the pressure campaigns truly want isn't a better movie. They want vindication. They want justification for all the years they've spent liking a critical bomb. They want the hollow pride of being able to say that they, and only they, knew there was a good movie hiding in there somewhere You see, they had to be obnoxious to shake it loose from the grip of the evil movie studio that only cares about releasing bad movies.

It's also a strange matter of social acceptance. They figure, what's the use of liking it if no one else likes it too? They don't want their movie to become a cult hit. They don't want to take solace in the discovery of a niche community of like-minded people like so, so many legendary movies have before. They want big Marvel movie-levels of mass acceptance and nothing else. Hoping a director's cut comes out as well as a Ridley Scott director's cut is already asking a lot. But to expect that a reshot, recut, rereleased version of a movie will live up to the success of a Marvel movie is just delusion. Unless they lie to themselves about it. Imagine if these movies still sucked after rerelease, and the fans didn't end up getting what they wanted, the knowledge they were right all along. They'd have to invent that success, hoping that gives them the peace of mind they're looking for - and that's a comically dark place to go to justify liking the fucking Justice League movie.

As a loudmouthed internet loser who whined when Mass Effect 3's ending sucked, Luis knows a thing or two about entitled fandom. He can be found on Twitter and Facebook. Catch him on the "In Broad Daylight" podcast with Cracked alums Adam Tod Brown and Ian Fortey! Check out his regular contributions to Macaulay Culkin's BunnyEars.com and his "Meditation Minute" segments on the Bunny Ears podcast. Listen to the first episode on Youtube!

Top Image: Warner Bros./ DC Comics