Zack Snyder might not be about to direct another DC movie in the near future, so far as we know anyway, but he still served as an executive producer on Aquaman, alongside his wife Deboarah Snyder. We haven’t heard a lot about how much say the Man of Steel filmmaker had on the movie, but now James Wan has revealed that the Snyders gave his director’s cut their blessing.
Wan spoke with Collider and confirmed that he’d shown the Snyders an early edit of Aquaman (the VFX hadn’t been completed and so storyboards were temporarily incorporated into the film). He said that, though the cut was “rough and crude,” the exec producers believed in his vision and highly approved of what he’d accomplished.
“Yeah, I showed Zack [Snyder] my Directors Cut pretty much right after I finished it and he gave me his thumbs up. He was really complementary about it. He basically gave his blessing to me to go finish the movie, because he knew how huge of an undertaking I had with the visual effects. What he saw was a lot of blue screen, a lot of pre-viz and a lot of storyboards. You photograph your storyboard’s and you cut it into the film and so it was very very rough and crude. But, I think the human element is there that played and I think he and Debbie [Snyder] were very complementary about it. They gave us their blessing.”
Though it has a much brighter tone than his works, Snyder’s fingerprints are actually all over Aquaman. He cast three of the film’s leads, for example, for their first appearances in his movies – Jason Momoa in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and Amber Heard and Willem Dafoe in Justice League (though Dafoe was removed from the theatrical release).
The Snyders will next be credited as producers on Wonder Woman 1984, after the filmmakers helped map out the story of the Amazon princess’ origin movie. Presumably, if an Aquaman sequel gets the greenlight – or when, as it’s surely only a matter of time – they’ll also be involved with the production of that, too. And, if we wish really, really hard, maybe Zack will even get the chance to release his Justice League cut at some point.