Even though I'm no #restorethesnyderverse zealot this seems like such a fruitless and vindictive article. They're releasing this article on the same day the movie is released on digital. What's the point of an article like this at this point?
I thought the article was very interesting. But, yeah, it did seem to have a certain… bias — painting a picture of Snyder as a Machiavellian (actually, Lex Luthor-ian
) manipulator of his fans via social media. For instance, this:
That means a fandom amplified by fake accounts helped shake down a major studio — at an ultimate cost to Warner Bros. of more than $100 million — to re-release a movie that had already bombed years earlier.
Kinda harsh and a tad hyperbolic. After all, restorations and director’s cuts aren’t exactly a new thing.
Blade Runner (which, likewise, bombed theatrically) was re-released (at some expense, presumably) as “the Director’s Cut” in 1992 and “the Final Cut” in 2007. And, of course, we genre types know about
Superman II: The Donner Cut. Do these examples also represent “shake downs,” orchestrated by organized and manipulative fans? Well, in a way, maybe they do. Boisterous fans express a collective desire for a restored cut; and the studios gauge whether that desire is substantial enough to be monetized. C'est la vie, c'est la guerre. Ditto for
ZSJL.
And to be fair to the article, there was acknowledgement that some portion of the #ReleasetheSnyderCut movement was composed of
actual (mostly well-behaved) people who were just hoping to see an original version of the movie. But this was downplayed, it seems to me. E.g.:
So while Snyder had scores of authentic, flesh-and-blood fans, those real stans were amplified by a disproportionate number of bogus accounts.
Well, metaphorically, “scores” can mean “lots and lots.” But, technically, a “score” is twenty. So “scores” could be interpreted as a relatively small number. IOW, the language used seemed calculated to diminish any
genuine interest in the Snyder Cut and emphasize, instead, the nefarious manipulation of social media. However, elsewhere in the article, this manipulation — from fake/bot accounts — is pegged at 13%. (Whereas, 3-5% fake on
any trending topic is considered “normal.”
) So according to my math, that means 87% of the support came from real online fans. And, presumably, those online fans only represented a portion of a larger total — who don’t use social media and therefore aren’t measured as following trends or hashtags.
Again, this isn’t the first time that a studio invested in an alternate version/restoration of a movie. (See above). So it’s not at all a crazy idea that HBO Max (looking for content during a pandemic) would bankroll the completion of Snyder’s cut. Yet the article sorta suggests that they were thoroughly duped by a sinister coalition of bots and toxic nerds. But… but… genuine fans of the restoration (those polite, non-toxic, non-bot ones) actually
do exist. They’re happy that
ZSJL now supersedes the theatrical cut in terms of legitimacy and are grateful that HBO stepped in and made it happen. However, I guess the notion of “satisfied customers” didn’t fit into the article’s thesis. So they didn’t get much attention.
