Rolling Stone: Fans are demanding that "Justice League: Director's Cut" be directed and starred by Zack himself?

The 2017 version of "Justice League" did not receive many positive reviews after its release. In fact, many people disliked the movie. It only scored 6.1 out of 10 on IMDb and received only 6.3 reviews. Later, many fans heard that there was an uncut version of Zack Snyder's version that was not changed by Joss Whedon, who was later hired by Warner Bros. In order to launch this version, many fans held the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut event on social networking sites, hoping to force Warner to release this version of "Justice League". Later, HBO Max announced that this version will premiere on the platform and will eventually be officially broadcast in multiple parts in 2021.

After watching this version, many fans said that it was a huge improvement over the original, and many people, including several actors who played characters in the movie, said that "this is a victory for fans." However, according to the latest report from Rolling Stone magazine, the driving force behind this may not actually be fans. Perhaps all of this was directed and acted by Zack Snyder himself.

In the weeks of spring 2020, Zack Snyder repeatedly requested that the names of two producers, Geoff Johns and Jon Berg, be removed from his re-edited version of "Justice League". His CAA agent also called Warner Bros. for several consecutive days to question this matter. Another producer, Snyder's wife Deborah, also pressured a studio executive to make this instruction. In this regard, Snyder admitted that after the "personal requests" of the two producers were ignored, the Snyders "asked the studio" to intervene. On June 26, 2020, Snyder confronted an executive in the studio's post-production department and threatened: "Jeff and Jon dragged their feet on deleting their names in my cut. Now, I will destroy them on social media."

The #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign, which began in 2018, escalated with Snyder's demands, including intellectual property and funding he needed to obtain. Since then, a large number of attacks on Warner Bros. have followed, including calls for an executive to be fired and even death threats against some people in the company.

Rolling Stone magazine interviewed more than 20 people involved in the original Justice League and the Snyder Cut, and most of them believed that the director was trying to manipulate the event. But Snyder claimed: "If anyone is pulling the strings, it must be Warner Bros."

WarnerMedia recently provided Rolling Stone with two reports, according to which at least 13% of social media accounts participating in conversations about the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut campaign were fake accounts, far higher than the 3% to 5% of trending topics claimed by Twitter.

Rolling Stone also conducted its own investigation into the data, contacting two companies that track the authenticity of social media activity, Q5id and Graphika. Both companies also found a lot of inauthentic activity in the community. Becky Wanta, chief new system officer and chief technology officer of Q5id, said that the company's analysis showed that these active accounts "undoubtedly contain bots."

"We saw certain patterns with the bots," she explained. "They all showed up in large numbers almost at the same time. Many times, thousands or even millions of messages could be grouped into one or two sources. At the same time, they all traced back to an anomalous server in a remote country, and they all had exactly the same content."

"Zack is like Lex Luthor on a rampage," a source said.

Another firm, Alethea Group, discovered a domain called forsnydercut.com, which claims to have helped spread the campaign's hashtag in May 2018 and became the center of efforts to bring Snyder back to the helm of the DC film universe. The domain was registered to an individual who also ran a now-defunct advertising agency.

But maybe fans do in fact play a leading role in this. Avneesh Chandra, a data analyst at Graphika, doesn’t think these inauthentic campaigns are very effective, noting that “many of these accounts are posting spam and failing to stand out from the noise,” but at the same time he says there is clearly some manipulation going on: “Most of this campaign is made up of truly passionate users who are taking direction from influential figures in the pro-Snyder community. We often see these types of protest social media campaigns coordinated and driven by real people online. When you kick a hornet’s nest of a large, engaged, and confrontational fan community, it can be just as scary as dealing with a bunch of fake accounts, if not more so.”

A source told Rolling Stone that Snyder hired an online marketing firm in 2016 to boost fan engagement after Batman v Superman was panned by critics, a claim Snyder himself denied.

This news was also forwarded to some forums. On the Reddit forum, a user said that the focus of this Rolling Stone magazine article tends to describe Zack Snyder as the mastermind behind the event, and he directed and acted in everything himself. He thinks that "although this is a bit unrealistic, it is not completely impossible." He believes that Zack Snyder may have helped promote it behind the scenes, but he was not the first person to initiate this event. Later, many users agreed that Zack Snyder is unlikely to be the so-called "mastermind behind the scenes."