Ever since Zack Snyder’s long awaited cut of Justice League finally made it’s way to HBOMax last month, it’s fair to say it’s been pretty divisive. We were well aware that were plenty of people who had already proclaimed it the best movie ever made (they spent more than three years being pretty vocal about their certainty) but we may have underestimated how many people had written it off as the worst thing Hollywood ever vomited out as well.
It soon became obvious that for every fan who declared the Snyder Cut the Second Coming of movie excellence and accepted Zack Snyder as their lord and saviour, there was someone who prayed daily for its complete and absolute failure. And that second tribe of thought wrote it off without giving it anything that resembled a chance.
But an interesting wrinkle has emerged in the argument over the Snyder Cut’s quality (it was never a debate so much as countless strangers screaming at each other over message boards and comment sections).
There are a lot of armchair studio execs trying to label it a failure.
Snyder Cut haters have been pouring over mountains of numbers the past few weeks in a bid to prove that it failed to meet studio expectations and was a financial failure. They’ve been crunching the numbers to help argue that it failed to move the needle in HBOMax’s favour subscriber wise, even during a global pandemic when theatre going really isn’t a thing and people are starved for new content and entertainment.
But their grim proclamations and the glee they take in making them are missing the point.
First of all, the way streaming metrics are measured still have a long way to go. Unlike box office performance, there current methods to determine how successful something is on streaming are flawed and need a lot of finessing. Every major service’s definition of a “view” is different, with some deeming a thirty second glimpse the same as watching something in its entirety. In essence, they equate sitting through the opening credits the same as watching the entire two hour movie.
And second, since some studios own the services exclusively showing said movies (or they are original content produced by the service provider in question), it’s fair to assume the numbers we do have to work with are, shall we say, a little skewed. It should come as no surprise that Netflix claims in-house productions like Stranger Things and The Witcher hold it’s viewership title over acquisitions like The Office and Brooklyn 99. It would be naive to think they weren’t competitive, but it would be equally naive to think there wasn’t some creative accounting going on as well.
Even the most quoted sources (like Samba TV) can only collect information from viewers who have voluntarily enabled their data collection service. While those services (and access to them) expand by leaps and bounds every day, they aren’t universal. Which means they simply can’t paint a complete picture (yet).
Until those (and other) issues are rectified, there just isn’t an objective way to accurately gauge a movie or show’s success via streaming. We could always take the studio or service’s word for it, but we probably shouldn’t.
(The reason box office numbers are more reliable is because, as publicly traded companies, studios are legally obligated to report accurate financial numbers. While all the major streaming services are also publicly traded, they can get away with moving the goal posts on what constitutes or defines a “view”).
But it wasn’t really about the numbers. Sure, maybe Warner Bros. and AT&T’s bean counters probably had their fingers crossed that the Snyder Cut would attract a bunch of new subscribers, but they probably weren’t counting on it (despite the corporate spin, HBOMax’s subscription base is miles behind Netflix, DisneyPlus and Amazon Prime). And no one was expecting Justice League to break even dollar wise. You can bet Warner Bros. will milk it as much as they can, but 2017’s Justice League was the first DCEU movie to lose money. And that’s before the 70 million dollar cheque Warner wrote Snyder to finish the Snyder Cut. The truth is the Snyder Cut would have been a black hole for money even if it convinced ten million more people to sign up for HBOMax.
But it wasn’t about the dollars either. The Snyder Cut hasn’t just been an epic saga for Warner Bros ever since the theatrical version bombed in the fall of 2017. It’s been a headache. Fans weren’t merely clamouring for Zack Snyder’s version following the theatrical failure; they were demanding it. But Warner made things worse for themselves by claiming it never existed. That wound up provoking a prolonged backhand forth with Snyder fans, who turned out to be far more vocal and persistent than anyone thought (with some being outright toxic).
Releasing the Snyder Cut was both an unspoken apology as well as a way to put the whole thing to bed. As it stands, both Snyder and Warner Bros. are officially done with the “DC Snyderverse” and are moving in different directions, apparently amicably.
Yes, it can be argued that the Snyder Cut didn’t attract substantial new subscriber numbers and was ignored by a large number of casual fans. But it was still watched by a lot of people. Millions in fact.
And while there are a lot of skeptics and downright haters who don’t want to admit it, a lot of people liked the Snyder Cut. Millions of fans waited years to see it and judging by the response on social media, they felt it was well worth the wait. That’s what movies are made for; to be enjoyed.
It also got people talking for a few days. Whether you liked it or hated it, whether you sat through it at or ignored it completely, odds are it dominated plenty of water cooler talk the world over. It trended on Twitter for like a week. And when the Snyder Cut dominated the conversation, HBOMax inevitably popped into the subject bar once or twice. It was like a free commercial.
The Snyder Cut wasn’t about the bottom line for anyone involved. It gave Zach Snyder a chance to complete his vision after horrific personal tragedy robbed him of it (while Snyder refused any salary, his fans helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for suicide prevention as part of their grassroots campaign to make the Snyder Cut a reality). It gave millions of fans what they spent years drooling for. It brought smiles to lots of faces (an accomplishment that cannot be discounted during these dark and dismal days) and it put the whole saga to bed outside some persistent fans.
The Snyder cut was not one of the greatest achievements in cinematic history. But neither was it a failure. It checked off every box it was designed to. And while there’s a lot of people who don’t want to hear it, that makes it a success.
Image via www.nofilmschool.com
