Back in 2015, in the packed Hall H of San Diego Comic-Con, Warner Bros. panel host and actress Aisha Tyler was doing what all Comic-Con panel hosts do: hyping up the crowd. But the language I saw her use to introduce the director of the upcoming Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has always struck me as unintentionally chilling: “I know somebody out there has some unnatural love for the person who is about to come out on this stage, but it can’t be as deep, intense, or unnatural as mine.” The crowd erupted into hysterical screams around me as director Zack Snyder bounded onto the stage.

Five years and at least one controversial film later, that “unnatural love” helped achieve what many considered impossible. Like Superman rising up from the grave in 2017’s Justice League, the fabled “Snyder Cut” will emerge in 2021, the result of WarnerMedia finally acknowledging a long and occasionally toxic fan campaign that mixed good-intentioned fundraising with coordinated and vicious social media attacks on critics, myself included. Has one company, in its desire to stir up attention around the launch of its streaming service HBO Max, emboldened “bad fan” behavior? Or is this just the new normal of fandom ownership in our social media age?

The Snyder Cut, if you’ve been fortunate enough to dodge this particular geek controversy, is the name fans gave a cut of Justice League they believed existed. When Snyder left his work on Justice League in May 2017 in the wake of his daughter’s death, Warner Bros. handed the film to Marvel alum Joss Whedon to complete. The resulting film, an unwieldy Snyder–Whedon hybrid, satisfied neither critics nor followers, and some die-hard fans became convinced that if Snyder had been able to complete the film on his own terms, they would have gotten a much more satisfactory team-up movie with some of DC Comics’ most famous superheroes. The hashtag #ReleaseTheSnyderCut was born. Plenty of earnest pleas came with it, but also vitriol that was extreme even for Twitter, including harassment campaigns targeted at critics, HBO Max, Warner Bros, and its employees. Former DC Film chief Geoff Johns left the platform entirely after receiving endless Twitter attacks, and director James Gunn, who was hired to write and direct a Suicide Squad sequel for the studio, discovered that his new gig came with at least one death threat from a user with a Batman avatar.

Words, motivations, and flavors of fandom matter here. The community surrounding the resurrection of Justice League is a particularly potent group of rock-solid DC comic book devotees. There's also an undeniable the cult of personality surrounding Snyder. Long before he took up the unofficial mantle of shepherd of the post–Christopher Nolan DC film era, Snyder already had a rabid following thanks to applying a saturated video game aesthetic to geek-friendly Warner Bros. films like his sepia-drenched comic book adaptation 300, his dutiful adaptation of Watchmen, or his own creation: the sexed-up killing spree known as Sucker Punch. (None of them quite matched the fresh promise of his debut: a nimble remake of the zombie classic Dawn of the Dead.)

If you ensnared any of those Comic-Con attendees screaming for Snyder with Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth, most would have been unable to tell you who was running either DC Entertainment or even Warner Bros. studios at the time. (It was Geoff Johns and Kevin Tsujihara, respectively, neither of whom work there anymore.) After the 2013 premiere of Man of Steel, it appeared to fans that Snyder and his wife and producing partner, Deborah Snyder, had their hands on the steering wheel of all things Justice League, which was DC’s answer to Marvel’s Avengers. The truth was always messier than that. Nolan’s team was reportedly still involved after The Dark Knight Rises and heavily influenced Snyder’s Man of Steel. When Ben Affleck, fresh off an Oscar win, signed a multi-film deal to play Batman in 2013, the actor negotiated his Oscar-winning Argo screenwriter Chris Terrio be brought in to rewrite Batman v Superman.

But truth never got in the way of a good story, and Snyder was the face of a franchise in much the same way Kevin Feige is the face of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Snyder, however, was never actually in charge of the studio. Still, fandom campaigns often stem from an idea of ownership—the notion that the viewers know best how a story should be told. This particular fandom, for better or worse, had decided Zack Snyder and only Zack Snyder should be the one to tell the story of the Justice League. After all, it’s #ReleaseTheSnyderCut not #ReleaseTheDirectorsCut.

As fan voices have been amplified in the age of social media, the relationship between studios and their audiences have grown more interactive. A studio today would be unlikely to make a property like Ghost in the Shell with a white actress in the leading role after online backlash helped sink the Scarlett Johansson–led adaptation of the popular Japanese anime. And due to protest online, white actor Ed Skrein backed out of playing the historically Asian Ben Daimio in 2019’s Hellboy. The role went instead to Daniel Dae Kim.

The Fast and Furious films, one of the most wildly profitable franchises in the world, make ample use of fan reaction in crafting their stories. Series star and producer Vin Diesel famously pays close attention to his fandom, which is how actors like Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham joined the family (and landed their own spin-off). It was the fans who brought both Michelle Rodriguez’s character Letty and Sung Kang’s Han back from the dead. The latter popped up as a surprise in a recent trailer for F9, which boasted the tagline “Justice is coming,” a direct nod to the fan hashtag #JusticeForHan—and further evidence of how much pride Diesel takes in the progressive diversity of his muscle-bound car franchise.

But while the Fast and Furious fandom seems to exist in a space of almost supernatural positivity, the massive fandoms behind geek monoliths like Star Wars come with vicious, loud voices who work hard to ruin the fun. A segment of the Lucasfilm community that was dissatisfied with Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi mercilessly hounded both the director and at least one of his stars, Kelly Marie Tran, in the wake of that film. J.J. Abrams’s decisions to reverse some of Johnson’s choices and the sidelining of Tran from his sequel The Rise of Skywalker felt like a direct response to those voices.

Fan movements with some sort of social messaging behind them—be it improving Hollywood’s diversity or actual charitable campaigns—are the most powerful of all, and here the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut crowd found some protection, combining their efforts to resurrect a superhero film with some very real and unimpeachable good in raising money for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

That fundraising aspect helped reinforce a narrative that if not for his family's tragedy, Snyder would have delivered Justice League free from studio intervention. (Some behind-the-scenes reporting has indicated that that’s not the case.) The altruistic aspect of the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement even inspired celebrities, who might otherwise have stayed out of it, to add their voices. Several members of the Justice League cast tweeted out the hashtag as part of a fundraiser back in November.

Celebrities who weren’t associated with Justice League also joined in.

The fan movement, spurred on by Snyder and his allies, was emboldened when they saw the movie that Warner Bros. released. The studio tried to claim that much of Snyder’s vision had been preserved in the theatrical version, but Henry Cavill’s heavily CGI’d upper lip (a digital attempt to hide his Mission: Impossible mustache during Whedon’s reshoots) exposed just how little of the director’s own scenes made it into the final product.

The truth about whether or not Snyder’s version even existed at all ceased to matter. Snyder claimed it did, posting film canisters labeled “Z.S. JL Director’s Cut, Running Time 214” back in December. (The Whedon–Snyder version was only 121 minutes.) Cavill has said that there may be footage that has been pieced together, but that he hasn’t seen it.

Whatever it was Snyder had in that can, according to the Hollywood Reporter the version coming to HBO Max in 2021 will require at least $20 million to pull off and may even entail another round of extensive reshoots. Thankfully, Cavill will be freshly shaved.

Why would anyone object to a project that will employ a number of people and make a certain fandom extremely happy (at least at the prospect of it, if not the final result) during these troubling times? The main concern—where there is concern—is that WarnerMedia, in harnessing a fan movement to promote the launch of HBO Max next week, has rewarded entitled fandoms of the future: even if you behave badly, you, too, could get own version of a Snyder cut.

Despite the good they have done raising money for a worthy cause, it’s hard to ignore the toxic side of this fandom, which has targeted and harassed critics who have dared even tweet criticisms about Snyder’s work. I have been told to kill myself on countless occasions by Twitter accounts with either Superman or Batman logos. When fandom becomes identity, every negative review seems like a personal attack.

In not only giving over to these fans, but using their language—#ReleaseTheSnyderCut–in its official announcement, HBO Max has given legitimacy to all actions of this fandom. Not very heroic of them.

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