By Jackie Shannon
With Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, producer/director, Zack Snyder, has delivered a superhero blockbuster of gargantuan proportions, with the film taking in a whopping $500 million at the box office in just a week. According to Forbes Magazine, it is already the fourth biggest DC Comics movie behind only Man Of Steel ($668m), The Dark Knight ($1.003 billion), and The Dark Knight Rises ($1.084 billion), all of which, of course, have been in circulation for a number of years. The critical and fan response to Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice, however, has been decidedly mixed, with many questioning the film’s gloomy tone and confused narrative.
Some fans, in fact, are so incensed that they have started a petition to convince backing studio, Warner, to drop Zack Snyder as the director of Justice League: Part 1 and Justice League: Part 2, the superhero double-shot team-up that Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice so intricately sets up. “Zack Snyder is not the person to bring The Justice League to the big screen,” begins the whiny rant on change.org. “He’s had two chances now to adapt DC characters and has produced middling results. Even if you loved Man Of Steel and Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice. There has to come a time when WB and DC want someone at the helm that can create something that won’t divide people in such a way. The building blocks are there for a great different set of superhero movies. Good actors and actresses and even directors. Zack Snyder is just not the guy that should be in charge of the biggest and most important films in the franchise. Especially with his track record now.”
Geez, life must be tough when the only thing that you can think of to start a petition about is having a director bumped from a superhero movie. Also, poor phrasing aside, the instigators of said petition obviously don’t know too much about the movie business. Zack Snyder is already deep into production on Justice League: Part 1, and Warner would be highly unlikely to bounce him from the project now. “We’ve been talking a lot about where we’re going to go with Justice League…we kind of knew what Justice League was going to be pretty early on, which allowed us to lay the groundwork in a lot of ways,” Snyder told FilmInk last year on the set of Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice. “Justice League is my next movie, and that’s about turning the whole thing up to eleven.”
And, just looking at it all as a numbers game, the petition on change.org is hovering around a mere 10,000 supporters…which is only a very, very small percentage of the aforementioned $500 million that Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice has made at the box office, so don’t expect Warner to be too shaken up about it. Scoot on over to change.org to check it out…and then have a look at the large range of petitions on the website that are actually worth signing.
Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice is in cinemas now.
