In the grand scheme of things, the epilogue of Zack Snyder’s Justice League is nothing but a triple whammy of fan service, designed to let viewers know what the filmmaker had planned across the rest of his proposed five-film arc before his tenure as the architect of the DCEU was cut short following his initial departure from the franchise’s all-star movie.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t cool to witness a makeshift version of the titular team in the Knightmare timeline, though, even if we’re probably not going to see it paid off in the future. Of course, the undoubted highlight of the brand new footage is the interaction between Ben Affleck’s Batman and Jared Leto’s Joker, finally giving the two iconic characters the major exchange that Warner Bros. and DC Films’ shared universe had been lacking up until then.
Almost every line of dialogue is packed with references to events that have directly informed how both of them reached the point where they had to form a tenuous alliance, with the Joker constantly needling the Dark Knight about the death of Robin, while Batman retaliates by informing the Clown Prince of Crime that Harley Quinn had told him to kill her former beau as slowly as possible.
Sadly, we’ll have to use our imaginations to envision what Snyder had in store, but luckily, the director has been dropping all sorts of information about the rest of his intended Justice League trilogy, and in a new interview, he revealed that we’d have seen the Joker killing Robin as part of a flashback.
“So basically in the alternate-future movie, we would have been in this post-Superman, Anti-Life Equation world, where the team knew that the only way to fix the world was to run Flash back and warn Bruce to save Lois. And so in that world, the movie was basically going to be about a ragtag group of Justice League members pulling off a crazy mission to steal a Mother Box from this half-destroyed cathedral in Gotham and get it back to the Batcave in order to use it to power the cosmic treadmill to jump Flash back in time. And the night before the big mission, they would have this last supper sort of reckoning, where they would all tell their stories. One of those stories was Joker telling the story of the death of Robin.”
When Snyder keeps divulging such massive revelations about his abandoned Justice League sequels, it’s only going to embolden the #RestoreTheSnyderVerse movement, regardless of how little interest the studio have in picking up the discarded plot points in the future.