An Open Letter To DC Comics, and Warner Bros. Discovery, about Finishing What Was Begun
A Fan Proposal for the Return of Zack Snyder and the Completion of the Justice League Trilogy Submitted on behalf of millions of DC fans worldwide
To the Leadership of DC Studios and Warner Bros. Discovery:
We are writing not in anger, and not with entitlement. We are writing as people who love these characters, who understand that filmmaking is an industry as much as it is an art form, and who believe — with considerable evidence on our side — that you are sitting on one of the most valuable unmined veins in modern popular culture.
The argument is simple: Zack Snyder built something. The fans proved it. The numbers confirmed it. And when Warner Bros. walked away from it, they left money, goodwill, and a completed trilogy's worth of story on the table. This letter is a case, built in data and in passion, for why finishing the Snyder Justice League trilogy is not just artistically right — it is the single most strategically sound creative investment DC could make in the near term.
What follows is not nostalgia. It is a business proposal with heart.
I. WHAT THE #RELEASETHESNYDERCUT CAMPAIGN ACTUALLY PROVED
Before we talk about what Zack Snyder's Justice League delivered, we need to talk about what it cost to get it made in the first place. Because the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement was not merely a fan tantrum. It was one of the most sustained, organized, and ultimately successful acts of fan advocacy in cinema history — and what it demonstrated about this audience should terrify anyone who would dismiss or ignore it.
The original Change.org petition, launched in November 2017 just days after the Whedon cut hit theaters, garnered nearly 178,000 signatories before closing. That number alone tells a story. But the petition was only the beginning. By 2019, the campaign had moved into full-scale public spectacle: a towering Times Square billboard, a plane dragging a banner over San Diego Comic-Con, a social media coordinated assault that put the hashtag in front of every Warner executive every single morning. Within a week of ZSJL's release in March 2021, #RestoreTheSnyderVerse had been used as a hashtag over one million times, trending worldwide — with some reports placing the count beyond 1.5 million in a single day.
When the studio finally released Snyder's new cut in March 2021, the fledgling fan hashtag #RestoreTheSnyderVerse racked up more than a million tweets in one day. For context: that is not a niche community finding its voice. That is a mass audience with a specific, articulable demand, organized around a creative vision they believe in.
But perhaps the most striking data point of all — the one that speaks not just to enthusiasm but to character — is this: the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement raised over $1.1 million for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
These fans did not simply demand. They gave. They organized charity runs and donation drives alongside their social media campaigns. They built a community, and they used that community to do something genuinely good in the world. That is not a toxic mob. That is a passionate, human audience that cares deeply about the art they love and the artist who made it.
You do not ignore an audience like this. You serve it.
II. WHAT ZACK SNYDER'S JUSTICE LEAGUE ACTUALLY DELIVERED — BY THE NUMBERS
Warner Bros. spent approximately $70 million to complete Snyder's cut of Justice League, including new visual effects, score completion, and a small amount of additional photography. The Whedon cut had been a critical and commercial embarrassment — the theatrical Justice League grossed $657.9 million worldwide off an estimated $300 million production cost and, according to Deadline film finance sources, lost $60 million at the time. The Snyder Cut was, in one sense, a studio cleaning up a mess it had made. But what it became was something else entirely.
The theatrical release of Justice League holds a 40% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Snyder Cut holds a 97% audience score — a swing from 40% to 97% that is not a marginal improvement. It is a complete reversal of the audience's verdict. Critics were more divided, but even there the shift was dramatic: ZSJL earned a 77% Fresh critical rating compared to the Whedon cut's 40%, a score dramatically better than Batman v Superman's 28% and better than Man of Steel's 56%.
The streaming numbers tell the same story in economic language. In the week of ZSJL's release, HBO Max's week-over-week downloads increased by more than 60% — more than the increases of Disney+, Showtime, Roku, and AT&T TV combined. Subscriber monitoring service ANTENNA reported that ZSJL led to a 2.3% increase in HBO Max signups the weekend it premiered. Forbes calculated that with 1.48 million new downloads of HBO Max — assuming those are all paying subscribers at $14.99 — the platform contribution adds up to roughly $22.2 million monthly, a solid number against the $70 million invested to complete the film.
By 39 days after its release, 3.7 million US households had watched Zack Snyder's Justice League — double the viewership of the first week, suggesting HBO Max subscribers continued to seek out and watch the movie long after its premiere.
That word-of-mouth sustainability is exactly what you want from a platform title. The audience didn't just show up opening weekend. They told people. People went.
Internationally, the film performed strongly in markets where DC typically struggles. In Spain, the film became the third most-viewed release of 2021 on HBO Max España. In Germany, it ranked first during its first full week on Netflix and spent seven weeks in its weekly top-ten rankings. According to Whip Media, who track viewership for 19 million worldwide users of their TV Time app, the film was the eighth most-streamed film of 2021.
And it ranked first on the NPD Videoscan First Alert chart for home media sales in the United States during its first week, as well as in Blu-ray sales — selling five times more than the second-ranked title.
Five times. Not twice. Not 20% more. Five times more than the runner-up in Blu-ray sales, for a four-hour director's cut of a film that had already been released four years earlier. That is a fanbase that buys. That is a fanbase that owns. That is a fanbase that invests in the art they love.
III. THE CREATIVE ARGUMENT: WHY VISION MATTERS COMMERCIALLY
There is a persistent myth in studio thinking that 'audience-pleasing' and 'auteur vision' are opposing forces — that you must choose between the filmmaker who has something to say and the broad appeal necessary to move tickets. Snyder's DCEU complicates that myth in every direction.
His films were consistently more divisive with critics than with audiences. Man of Steel sits at 57% on Rotten Tomatoes among critics and 74% with audiences. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice earned a dismal 28% critical score — and a 63% audience score, which is to say that nearly two-thirds of the people who watched it thought it was worth their time, in spite of an almost universally negative press reception. The Snyder Cut's 97% audience score against a 78% critical score represents the widest favorable gap in the director's DC career: critics remained skeptical, and audiences did not care. They had already made up their minds.
What this tells us is that Snyder's audience is not dependent on critical mediation. They come to his films prepared to receive something specific — a mythic, operatic, painterly vision of heroism that does not apologize for its own grandeur. They know what they are getting. They want it. And when they finally got the complete version of what he had actually intended with Justice League, they greeted it with the closest thing to unanimous approval that any major superhero film has produced in the modern era.
Unfinished stories are not just an artistic failure. They are an economic one. The Snyder Cut ends on a cliffhanger. The Knightmare timeline is half-built. Darkseid's invasion of Earth remains unlaunched. The Anti-Life Equation's resolution is unshown. Every scene in ZSJL that points forward is a promise that has not been kept — and the 97% audience score means that 97% of the people who watched it want to see the rest. You have a proven, passionate audience waiting for the continuation of a story you already own. You have a filmmaker who has expressed willingness to return. You have infrastructure, established characters, and an existing fanbase to market directly to.
The question is not whether this audience exists. The question is whether you are willing to serve it.
IV. THE SUPERMAN (2025) CONTRAST: A DIFFERENT KIND OF STORY
Let us be explicit about something before we proceed: James Gunn is a gifted filmmaker. The Suicide Squad, Guardians of the Galaxy, Peacemaker — these are works of genuine craft, wit, and emotional intelligence. Nothing that follows is an argument against James Gunn's talent or his fitness to build a DC universe.
This is an argument about strategy. And the strategic picture of DC's reboot is more complicated than Warner Bros. has publicly acknowledged.
James Gunn's Superman grossed $618.7 million worldwide, making it the tenth highest-grossing film of 2025. Its 83% critical score and 91% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes fueled strong domestic performance, and it became the highest-grossing solo Superman film in US history, surpassing Man of Steel's $291 million domestic run. On the surface, that is a success. But look beneath the headline figure, and a different story emerges.
Superman earned $615.7 million worldwide after an 84-day theatrical run, with a production budget of $225 million and an additional $125 million spent on global marketing — bringing total costs to approximately $350 million. Theaters typically retain around 50% of ticket sales, meaning Superman's theatrical net was roughly $308 million before residuals and other expenses. Warner Bros. has claimed $125 million in profits, a figure Forbes described as 'murky,' noting that with the standard 50/50 theatrical split, the film was approximately at or just shy of break-even when the full ledger of costs is considered.
Most high-profile superhero blockbusters aim for international receipts of 50–60% of global gross. Superman's two-week results saw its international numbers contribute only 42.2% of its overall total — and analyst Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Relations told Variety: 'Domestically, Superman stuck the landing, but international numbers are disappointing.
By comparison, Zack Snyder's Man of Steel — made twelve years ago, on a smaller budget, in a less favorable superhero climate — pulled 56.6% of its total from the international box office. Snyder's Superman outperformed Gunn's Superman internationally, despite being over a decade older.
None of this is Gunn's fault. His film is charming, well-acted, and competently constructed. It is doing something genuinely different from Snyder's DCEU — lighter, more earnest in a classical sense, more consciously optimistic. That creative choice is legitimate. But it is also a complete erasure of what came before: the mythology, the character arcs, the audience investment that Snyder's three films built. Every dollar spent on the Gunn reboot is a dollar not spent finishing a trilogy that already has a built-in, proven, passionately loyal global audience waiting.
DC abandoned a 97% audience-approved story with millions of viewers and a fanbase that raised over a million dollars for charity — in order to start over with a film that just barely broke even and underperformed internationally against the very films it replaced.
That is not a business success. That is a strategic miscalculation.
V. WHAT FINISHING THE TRILOGY COULD LOOK LIKE
The Snyderverse does not require a full universe rebuild. It does not require casting every new character, launching a streaming series, or competing with Gunn's DCU on the same release schedule. What it requires is simple: two more films, completing the story that was started. Justice League 2 and Justice League 3, produced under Snyder's direction, delivered to the audience already sitting on the other side of a cliffhanger.
The economic case is straightforward. The Snyder Cut cost $70 million to complete and generated a 60%+ week-over-week spike in platform downloads, a 2.3% subscriber increase on its opening weekend, #1 Blu-ray sales by a factor of five, and a global streaming footprint that put it in the top ten most-streamed films of 2021. A properly budgeted sequel — even at full theatrical scale — has a fanbase that has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it will show up. It has demonstrated that it does not require critical consensus. It has demonstrated that it will buy, rewatch, and evangelize.
The audience is not hypothetical. It is documented. It is organized. It is patient. It has been waiting for years, and it has not gone away. Every petition signature, every hashtag, every Blu-ray purchase, every charity dollar raised — all of it is market research that money cannot buy. It is an audience telling you, in the most direct terms available to them, that they want this product.
There is also a multiverse argument to be made here, though it need not be the primary frame. DC currently operates in a universe where multiple continuities can coexist. The Snyderverse need not interfere with Gunn's DCU any more than the Elseworlds banner interfered with the New 52. They can live in parallel, serve different audiences, and both generate revenue. This is not complexity — it is opportunity.
VI. THE ASK
To DC Studios and Warner Bros. Discovery, we ask for the following:
Engage. Sit down with Zack Snyder. Have the conversation. Explore what finishing the trilogy would look like, what it would cost, what it would require, and what it could return. The conversation has never publicly happened in good faith. Have it.
Listen to the data. The numbers in this letter are not cherry-picked. They represent the documented reality of an audience that showed up for ZSJL in a way that moved platform metrics, drove subscriber growth, and outperformed Blu-ray competition by a factor of five. That audience is still there. They are still buying tickets to films you make. They deserve acknowledgment.
Honor the story. Darkseid is still out there. The Anti-Life Equation is still hanging in the air. The Knightmare future is still possible. A story was told — brilliantly, passionately, and in full — up to its penultimate chapter. All we are asking is for the last two chapters to exist.
This is not a demand. It is an invitation. The fans built this case, and the numbers stand behind it. The rest is up to you.
With love, with data, and with considerable patience,
DC Fans Worldwide
Key Statistics at a Glance
| Metric | Zack Snyder's Justice League | Superman (2025) |
|---|---|---|
| Completion / Production Cost | $70M (to finish) | $225M |
| Marketing Cost | Included above | $125M additional |
| RT Audience Score | 97% | 91% |
| RT Critic Score | 78% | 83% |
| Platform Impact | +60% HBO Max downloads week-over-week | 13M viewers first 10 days |
| International % of Total Box Office | N/A (streaming-only release) | 42.2% (target: 50–60%) |
| Blu-ray Chart Performance | #1 — sold 5× more than #2 title | N/A |
| Fan Petition Signatures | ~178,000 | N/A |
| Hashtag Volume | 1M+ tweets in 24 hours | N/A |
| Charity Raised (AFSP) | $1.1M+ | N/A |
| Theatrical Profitability | N/A (streaming release) | Near break-even per Forbes |
All figures sourced from Deadline, Forbes, Variety, Rotten Tomatoes, Samba TV, ANTENNA, Box Office Mojo, Whip Media, and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.
Petition: www.change.org/RestoreTheSnyderVerSE
All figures sourced from Deadline, Forbes, Variety, Rotten Tomatoes, Samba TV, ANTENNA, Box Office Mojo, Whip Media, and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.