In what was one of the most surprising production developments to hit the DC Extended Universe, it was revealed earlier this year that Joss Whedon has stepped in to replace director Zack Snyder and finish the upcoming Justice League. Since then, fans have wondered how much of Snyder's original vision for the superhero ensemble would be left intact after reshoots. Recent reports have minimized the role the recent work has played in the post-production process, however, suggesting that Whedon's task in bringing Justice League to the big screen is simply to touch up what Snyder already shot. Journalist Mark Hughes has a nice summation of the situation as it stands:
As of right now, despite the fact that there's been some extended time and it's like 'ok, if this is still ... why are they still doing shoots on this,' there's been a lot of downtime in between shooting because of people's schedules; they have not been shooting this entire time. The amount of content that has been shot and is being shot is still pretty much what they expected and figured was going to be happening. They haven't said 'oh, we need to add additional, we need to do a whole bunch more,' or anything like that at this point, so, the footage and the amount of footage in the film, as of right now, the majority of the footage that you're going to see on the screen is still the footage that was previously shot during principal photography.
It seems rumors of extensive reshoots are just that, with stars like Gal Gadot claiming that the vast majority of what we'll see in the final Justice League movie was shot some time ago.The Superhero News host's thoughts certainly gels with Gadot's recent comments saying that Joss Whedon is merely "fine-tuning" the DC Extended Universe blockbuster. Despite reshoots often being perceived as something negative, the process is extremely common in modern filmmaking, and is used far more often than not in that capacity. Of course, last month a Hollywood trade suggested that the changes being done to Justice League were budgeted at a surprisingly large $25 million, leading to the assumption that an extensive amount of the film is being reworked. Whether or not that budget is accurate in the first place is uncertain. After all, studio accounting is infamously bonkers.
Whatever the case may be, we may unfortunately never learn the full details. Regardless of how the final film is received when it hits the big screen this fall, you can be sure that comic book fans will be quite vocal about their various perceived balances of Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon proportionate auteur contributions to Justice League as a whole.
Between now and the film's release on November 17, you can stay up to date with all the latest Justice League facts with our guide to everything we know so far.
