Zack Snyder's 'Justice League' Reshoots Will Reportedly Cost Around $70 Million
Even though Zack Snyder's cut of Justice League wasn't supposed to undergo any reshoots with the film's primary superhero cast, yesterday brought news that the director was going to round up some of the stars to shoot new footage after all. Though originally the director's cut of the DC Comics superhero ensemble was reported to only cost around $20-30 million, with a majority of that involving new visual effects, a new report indicates that the reshoots have raised the budget to around $70 million. Yikes.
The Wrap has news on Zack Snyder's Justice League budget landing around $70 million, which is over double what the project was said to initially cost. By comparison, the reshoots for the theatrical cut cost around $25 million, and these new reshoots will cost as much as the entire second season of Game of Thrones. That's a lot of money to pay for reshoots to complete a movie that was already released theatrically with a completely different set of reshoots, but if HBO Max is able to get around 4.66 million new subscribers, that will cover the cost of the reshoots. Then, if any of those subscribers stick around for more than a single month, that's a profit.
Zack Snyder's Justice League reshoots are expected to happen next month for a week or two, though it appears that not everyone on the superhero will need to come back. The initial report indicated that Snyder would bring back Ben Affleck as Batman, Henry Cavill as Superman, Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Ray Fisher as Cyborg, which could be where a bulk of the cost is coming from. Though the latter is in a heated battle with Warner Bros. about how he was treated during the original reshoots with writer/director Joss Whedon, he's happy to return for this version of Justice League so his character gets his due diligence.
The good news is that any new scenes with Henry Cavill as Superman probably won't look as goofy as the reshoots done for the theatrical cut of Justice League. Cavill had a mustache grown for Mission: Impossible – Fallout that famously couldn't be shaved off, and visual effects artists had to digitally erase it from scenes, making for a pretty weird looking upper lip on the Man of Steel. But Snyder has said he won't be using a single frame of footage that Joss Whedon shot for Justice League, so it shouldn't be a problem.
Zack Snyder's cut of Justice League is said to be a four-hour affair, and it's slated to arrive on HBO Max sometime in 2021. Surely we'll be hearing plenty more about this developing director's cut, so stay tuned.