David Farnor | On 10, Mar 2021

Zack Snyder’s Justice League will be available exclusively on Sky Cinema in the UK and Ireland from Thursday 18th March, Sky has confirmed.

The much-discussed recut of the superhero blockbuster sees Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) determined to ensure Superman’s (Henry Cavill) ultimate sacrifice was not in vain. He aligns forces with Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) with plans to recruit a team of metahumans to protect the world from an approaching threat of catastrophic proportions.

The four-hour extended version of the film was confirmed earlier this year as premiering in the UK and Ireland on the same date as its debut on HBO Max in the USA. While a premium VOD model has been taken by Warner Bros for recent films, including Wonder Woman 1984, The Witches and – debuting on 11th March – The Little Things, Locked Down and Judas and the Black Messiah, the Snyder Cut of Justice League will instead be available to watch online exclusively through Sky Cinema.

It will air twice on the Sky Cinema channel at 8am and 8pm on Thursday 18th March, but will also be available on-demand from 7am for Sky TV customers. The film will be available in 4K to Sky Q customers who pay for the Ultra HD package. For those who don’t have Sky, the film will also be available to stream through Sky’s contract-free sister streaming service, NOW, where a NOW Cinema Membership costs £11.99 a month and gives on-demand and live streaming access to the whole Sky Cinema catalogue.

Virgin Media customers can also get Sky Cinema added to their TV service from £21 a month, with Ultra HD available depending on their package. BT TV and TalkTalk TV customers can get access to Sky Cinema through NOW.

NOW does not support 4K streaming, instead streaming titles in 720p HD. It has, however, recently introduced a “NOW Boost” to enable 1080p streaming and surround sound for all Sky Cinema titles on up to 3 devices at the same time, which costs an additional £3 a month.

As part of the film’s worldwide launch, Zack Snyder’s Justice League will also be available exclusively on Sky Cinema in Germany and Austria.

To watch the latest Justice League trailer – including a look at the return of Jared Leto’s Joker – click here.

Struggling to keep up-to-date with UK film releases? See our comprehensive guide to the big new movies coming soon to VOD.

 

Justice League Snyder Cut gets 18th March UK release

20th February 2021

It’s official: the Justice League: Snyder Cut will be released in the UK on 18th March, on the same day as its US premiere.

The original film, which was released in 2017, saw Bruce Wayne enlist the help of his newfound ally, Diana Prince, to face an even greater enemy. Together, Batman and Wonder Woman worked quickly to find and recruit a team of metahumans to stand against the threat – including Aquaman, Cyborg and The Flash. That film was completed by Joss Whedon, after Snyder stepped down from the helm due to a family tragedy.

Now, the Snyder Cut is coming, with a four-hour runtime that once led to talk of the recut being a miniseries. Included in that bumper-length feature are extra scenes featuring Ben Affleck, Amy Adams, Jeremy Irons and Diane Lane, plus Leto’s Joker, Cyborg and Hippolyta.

In the US, it will premiere on HBO Max on 18th March, but now, Snyder himself has officially confirmed that it will also be release on digital on the same day in the UK (and, indeed, worldwide, with the exception of China, France and Japan where release details are still TBC). The approach comes perhaps as no surprise, with Warner Bros opting for a premium VOD release for titles such as Wonder Woman 1984 and The Witches in recent months, with prices for PVOD rentals typically ranging from £13.99 to £15.99. Watch this space for confirmed platforms where the Snyder Cut will be available, but we expect it to be released on iTunes/Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, Rakuten TV, TalkTalk TV, Sky Store, CHILI, Microsoft Store, BT TV and PlayStation Video. No pre-orders are currently available, so there is a chance it might instead be released exclusively on Sky Cinema, following a recent deal between Sky and Warner.

 

Justice League Snyder Cut set for March US release

29th January 2021

HBO Max has confirmed that the Justice League: Snyder Cut will premiere this March – in the US, at least.

The original film, which was released in 2017, saw Bruce Wayne enlist the help of his newfound ally, Diana Prince, to face an even greater enemy. Together, Batman and Wonder Woman worked quickly to find and recruit a team of metahumans to stand against the threat – including Aquaman, Cyborg and The Flash. That film was completed by Joss Whedon, after Snyder stepped down from the helm due to a family tragedy.

Improbably, after a fan campaign for Snyder’s cut to be released, a recut version is on the way to our screens, with a lot of reshoots and post-production work to make it possible. Once planned to be a miniseries, what we do know is that it’ll be a four-hour affair, with extra scenes featuring Ben Affleck, Amy Adams, Jeremy Irons and Diane Lane, plus Jared Leto reprising his role as The Joker. There’ll also be more from Cyborg and Hippolyta too.

When can you watch all this? In the US, it will premiere on HBO Max on 18th March, continuing Warner’s plan to put all of its major titles on the new subscription streaming service – indeed, Warner’s films in the US will all hit cinemas and HBO Max on the same day. In the UK, where HBO Max doesn’t exist, Warner has taken the premium VOD route, with Wonder Woman 1984 and The Witches both made available to rent, due to cinema closures amid the coronavirus pandemic. Whether we can expect the same thing for the four-hour movie is yet to be confirmed – there’s always a possibility of a streaming service snapping up the individual title, with Sky Cinema recently inking a major new deal with Warner Bros, after years of a relationship between Warner and Amazon Prime Video in the UK.

With under 50 days to go until the US premiere, though, you can expect to find out the answer very soon – and, as always, stay tuned to VODzilla.co for the most comprehensive and accurate UK streaming updates.

In the meantime, here are three new posters unveiled by Snyder (one of them featuring what appears to be the film reel of Justice League itself), which announced the US date:

 

Jared Leto’s Joker joins Justice League Snyder Cut

22nd October 2020

Jared Leto is reporting having one more laugh as the Joker, after joining the reshoots for the “Snyder Cut” of Justice League.

The original film, which was released in 2017, saw Bruce Wayne enlist the help of his newfound ally, Diana Prince, to face an even greater enemy. Together, Batman and Wonder Woman worked quickly to find and recruit a team of metahumans to stand against the threat – including Aquaman, Cyborg and The Flash.

That film was completed by Joss Whedon, after Snyder stepped down from the helm due to a family tragedy. But after a campaign from fans to see Zack Snyder’s original vision, HBO eventually announced it would release a new, four-hour cut as a miniseries on HBO Max. With that set for a release in 2021, Snyder has been busy assembling a cast for reshoots and additional footage.

While Ben Affleck, Ray Fisher and Amber Heard have reportedly been on set for the extra filming, one figure has emerged as a surprise addition: Jared Leto. Leto played the Joker in 2016’s Suicide Squad and, according to THR, will reprise his role – despite not appearing in the 2017 movie at all. How he fits into Snyder’s original vision of a wider DC Cinematic Universe is not yet clear, but with producers Jon Berg and Geoff Johns (former studio executives who oversaw Whedon’s finishing of the film) both removing their names from the Snyder Cut, it’s clear that the filmmaker is completing this project in his own way.

 

Justice League Snyder Cut reported to cost $70m

26th September 2020

If ever you doubted HBO’s commitment to bringing Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League to the screen, a report from The Wrap this week reveal that they’re prepared to pay $70 million for it.

The original film sees Bruce Wayne enlist the help of his newfound ally, Diana Prince, to face an even greater enemy. Together, Batman and Wonder Woman work quickly to find and recruit a team of metahumans to stand against this newly awakened threat – including Aquaman, Cyborg and The Flash.

That film was completed by Joss Whedon, after Snyder stepped down from the helm due to a family tragedy. Whedon’s reshoots and rewrites leFt fans unhappy with the end result, and have even led to an investigation into allegations of mistreatment by the cast. After a campaign from fans to have the Snyder Cut released, HBO eventually announced it would release a new, four-hour cut as a miniseries as HBO Max exclusive in 2021.

Initially, that was expected to be made up of footage Snyder had already shot, with the director insisting that he would not be using any of Whedon’s footage. But now, it’s become apparent that reshoots will be taking place to record new footage – on top of the unseen video that was teased in the show’s first trailer, such as big bad Darkseid, a redesigned Steppenwolf, Superman in his black costume and a glimpse of Iris West (Kiersey Clemons), who was cut from the original film.

What was first thought to have a price tag of around $20 million, though, is now expected to cost a total of around $70 million – a mind-boggling budget for a film that has essentially already been finished and released, and had an expensive previous reshoot in the process. The reshoots will take place in October, with Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot and Ray Fisher to return as Batman, Wonder Woman and Cyborg – Henry Cavill has told Collider, however, that he will not return for reshoots.

That higher cost no doubt includes the expensive safety measures needed to film during the coronavirus pandemic, as well as the cast members’ fees, but it underscores not only how much stock HBO is placing in fan appetite for the project, but also how seriously it’s taking the idea of creating original, exclusive content for HBO Max.

 

HBO Max will actually release Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League

20th May 2020

HBO Max will officially release Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League, Warner Bros. has announced.

The new subscription service, which launches in the US later this month, is unlikely to ever arrive in the UK, with HBO already having deals in place with Sky Atlantic and co-producing a number of UK shows for American streaming, such as BBC’s Ghosts and Channel 4’s Home. Nonetheless, its launch marks another big moment in the shifting landscape of streaming media, as the industry tries to fight back against the disruption of Netflix – and, as more streaming services pop up around the world, drives the competition for exclusive and original content to even fiercer extremes.

HBO has just moved that bar to a new high with the announcement today that it will “#ReleaseTheSnyderCut”, after fans called for the version of Justice League to be unveiled.

In Justice League, Bruce Wayne enlists the help of his newfound ally, Diana Prince, to face an even greater enemy. Together, Batman and Wonder Woman work quickly to find and recruit a team of metahumans to stand against this newly awakened threat. But despite the formation of this unprecedented league of heroes—Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Cyborg and The Flash—it may already be too late to save the planet from an assault of catastrophic proportions.

#ReleaseTheSnyderCut first became a social media cry in 2017, after Snyder stepped down due to the tragic death of his daughter, and Joss Whedon was hired to steer the remainder of post-production and rewrote and added various scenes.

Rather unbelievably, the demands for the rumoured Snyder’s cut of the film haven’t abated since, and today, Snyder announced during a live online commentary of his film Man of Steel that the cut would, indeed, be released in 2021 on HBO Max.

The Justice League screenplay, according to HBO’s press release, is not credited to Joss Whedon but to Chris Terrio, with a story by Chris Terrio and Zack Snyder, based on characters from DC, Superman created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. The film’s producers are Charles Roven, Deborah Snyder, with executive producers Christopher Nolan, Emma Thomas, Jim Rowe, Ben Affleck, Wesley Coller, Curtis Kanemoto, and Chris Terrio.

“I want to thank HBO Max and Warner Brothers for this brave gesture of supporting artists and allowing their true visions to be realised. Also a special thank you to all of those involved in the SnyderCut movement for making this a reality,” said Snyder.

“Since I got here 14 months ago, the chant to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut has been a daily drumbeat in our offices and inboxes. Well, the fans have asked, and we are thrilled to finally deliver. At the end of the day, it really is all about them and we are beyond excited to be able to release Zack’s ultimate vision for this film in 2021. This could never have happened if it weren’t for the hard work and combined efforts of the teams at HBO Max and Warner Bros. Pictures,” commented Robert Greenblatt, Chairman, Warner Media Entertainment and Direct-To-Consumer.

“When Zack and Debbie shared the extraordinary vision of where Zack wanted to take Justice League, my team and our counterparts at Warner Bros. took it as a mission to solve the many issues that stood in the way,” commented Kevin Reilly, Chief Content Officer at HBO Max, President, TNT, TBS and truTV. “Thanks to the partnership at Warner Bros. and the relentless pursuit of the entire WarnerMax team we are able to deliver this incredibly exciting moment for Zack, the fans and HBO Max.”

Whether the “Snyder Cut” will ever be released in the UK, however, is another matter entirely. Watch this space for more.

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