Recently, io9 was on the set of Zack Snyder’s movie Justice League. The trip was coordinated to try and change perception after the polarizing response to Batman v Superman, but it also provided answers to some burning questions. Among them, why the heck did DC release a deleted scene online immediately after that film’s opening weekend?
Well, it was because they didn’t want to do what Marvel does.
A quick refresher. Batman v Superman opened on March 25. The following Monday, March 28, they released a deleted scene featuring Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor and a mysterious character we later learned is Steppenwolf. Steppenwolf is going to be the villain in Justice League so this seemed like a pretty significant scene. Here it is.
The scene itself is weird enough, but the timing was way more baffling. No one releases deleted scenes from a movie three days after the opening! If anything, they get tied to the Blu-ray release, which would mean it should’ve been released now, three months later. So, what was the thinking?
“I kind thought, ‘Oh, that would be a cool after-credits sequence,’” director Zack Snyder said on the set of Justice League. “But then I was like, ‘I don’t know, can I do that?’ because Marvel kind of does that. ‘Is that a thing?’ So we were like, ‘Oh! Well, maybe there’s another way to do it.’” And they decided to release it online.
So instead of putting the scene at the end of the credits, they put it online immediately after opening. Considering Luthor was already in jail at the end of the movie, it didn’t make much sense as an after-credits scene. But either way, it was a very interesting way of thinking. You could almost call it progressive, if the scene wasn’t obviously shot for the middle of the movie.
For more on Justice League, read our full visit to the set.