How Justice League’s Opening Scene Will Pay Off Batman’s BvS Arc

Zack Snyder’s Justice League will pay off Batman’s arc from Batman V Superman with its opening scene, which revisits the film’s climactic Doomsday battle from the Caped Crusader’s perspective. The Joss Whedon-directed reshoots on Justice League resulted in a very different movie than Snyder had originally intended, prior to him leaving the project (in the wake of a personal tragedy) in the spring of 2017. Whedon’s theatrical cut is generally regarded as being a Frankenstein’s Monster for the way it tries to blend his and Snyder’s very different styles. In the process of doing so, Whedon also removed or played down many of the direct connections to Snyder’s previous DCEU movies, Batman V Superman and Man of Steel.

This was particularly evident in Batman’s storyline in Whedon’s cut. Though the pre-reshoots synopsis for Justice League explicitly reference “Superman’s selfless act” during his, Wonder Woman, and Batman’s fight with Doomsday from Batman V Superman‘s climax and the way this restored Bruce Wayne’s faith in humanity, there’s no such nod in the theatrical version of the movie. Instead, the film opens with the Caped Crusader tracking one of Steppenwolf’s parademons in Gotham City and realizing it’s time to assemble the meta-humans of the world, with Superman no longer around to protect them.

The trailer for the upcoming Snyder Cut of Justice League includes a clip of Superman’s death from Batman V Superman, and it turns out that comes straight from the opening sequence. During an interview with Reel Anarchy, Snyder confirmed his version of Justice League starts off by revisiting the Doomsday showdown, but from a different perspective:

There’s another moment where you see Batman lowering that grenade launcher he used to fire his last kryptonite [bullet] on [Doomsday]. He’s lowering it and you see him [witnessing] the sacrifice that Superman has just done. And I think it’s full circle, weirdly, if you think about it. The First moment he saw Superman, he was like ‘That motherf***er!‘ And now, in this moment, he’s going ‘That guy just gave his life to save all of us‘.

This is a specific callback to the opening of Batman V Superman, in which the destruction of Metropolis and Superman’s battle with General Zod from Man of Steel is shown from Bruce Wayne’s perspective on the ground. It’s also the first time Batman has ever seen Superman in the DCEU and it leaves a strong impression on him. For most of Batman V Superman, the Caped Crusader perceives the Man of Steel as a threat, a super-powerful extraterrestrial who’s regarded as a savior by much of humanity, but one with the ability to murder countless people in the blink of an eye and not to be trusted. In the end, however, he realizes he was wrong and his need to make amends is what drives him at the beginning of Snyder’s Justice League. As the filmmaker put it, “A motivated Bruce Wayne is a cool thing. I mean we saw when he was motivated by hate and anger. So what does that same guy do when he’s motivated to make it right?”

With the Snyder Cut of Justice League now confirmed to release as a 4-part series on HBO Max in 2021 (with each episode running an hour long), the hope is this version of the movie will use the additional time to really flesh out the arcs of its characters, Batman among them. The Caped Crusader’s evolution from a xenophobic vigilante who brutalizes his enemies, to a more idealistic crime-fighter who recognizes the importance of collaborating with others, was present in Whedon’s Justice League, but like so much of the story, it felt flatter without the connective tissue to Batman V Superman (beyond the infamous scene where Superman echoes what Batman once said to him by asking “Do you bleed?”). Whether the Snyder Cut will actually be good remains to be seen, but with these restored plot threads, it promises to be more cohesive than the theatrical iteration and a true continuation of Snyder’s greater DCEU saga.