Zack Snyder Photo: Jamie McCarthy (Getty Images)
Dealing a crushing blow to the validity of the RestoreTheSynderVerse movement and The Flash’s Oscar win for “most cheer-worthy moment,” Rolling Stone released a bombshell report earlier today detailing the ways in which fake accounts supported the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign that wreaked havoc on social media for a few years before and left us with an even longer version of Justice League.
As hard as it is to believe, many of the champions of the Snyder Cut were bots or fake accounts, some of which, according to Rolling Stone, Snyder helped whip into a frenzy between the first issue of Justice League and well after the release Snyder bowed HBO Max. Two reports commissioned by WarnerMedia found that “at least 13 percent of the accounts that participated in the Snyder Cut conversation were deemed fake.” The norm on Twitter is roughly three to five percent, so as the outlet reported, “genuine posts were augmented by a disproportionate number of fake accounts.”
One report concluded:
After researching the online conversation regarding the release of the Snyder Cut of Justice League, specifically the hashtags “ReleaseTheSnyderCut” and “RestoreTheSnyderVerse” on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, [the analysts] found an increase in negative activity created by both real and fake authors. One identified community was made up of real and fake authors who were spreading negative content about WarnerMedia for not restoring the “SnyderVerse”. In addition, three main leaders were identified among authors scanned on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram – one leader on each platform. These leaders have received the most engagement and have many followers, giving them the opportunity to influence public opinion.
But the report is even more damning of Snyder, who Rolling Stone all but accused of actively manipulating the media and arming his fans against studio executives and journalists. As one source said at the exit, “Zach was like Lex Luthor wreaking havoc.” After 2019, when the hype surrounding the Snyder Cut movement led to your standard series of death threats and memes depicting the decapitated heads of Warner Bros. executives sent to the families of said executives, Snyder continued to tap into his fanbase. In one instance, he allegedly warned a reporter who published a story about a Flash casting announcement that he countered that his fans “are pretty, pretty, pretty gross.”
According to the report, much of Snyder’s anger at Warner Bros. regarding the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League is because of the producer credit originally given to Geoff Johns and Jon Berg. Cyborg actor Ray Fisher previously accused Johns and Berg of allowing director Joss Whedon, who Fisher claims abused, on the set of Justice League. Snyder wanted their names removed from Snyder’s clipping, and after taking too long, he told one executive, “Jeff and John are slow to get their names off my clipping. Now I’m going to destroy them on social media.
The piece also more or less blames Snyder for paying for the Snyder Cut’s publicity stunts, like that Times Square ad (the article states they can cost more than $50,000 a day) and a plane flying over the Comic Con promoting Cinder’s cutout. Snyder denied this and most of the claims made in the piece. But as one source put it, those stunts were “just more orchestrated nonsense from Zach.”
The entire report is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at a film that just wasn’t meant to be, one that the studio deemed a “total failure” when the original version was screened in 2017. But a quote from an anonymous insider in the material explains why: ” $73 million while people were losing their jobs at the studio for a director’s cut of a movie that had already lost hundreds of millions.”
Read the full report, which includes stolen hard drives, the web of conspiracies surrounding the fake accounts and the war to get The Martian into the movie.
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