Zack Snyder Releasing Director’s Cut Of His Most Exciting Movie?
Zack Snyder gets a lot of hate as a filmmaker—perhaps more than he deserves—but no one can deny that he has his own unique style. Nowhere is that style more evident than in the 2011 film Sucker Punch, Snyder’s first and arguably only attempt at an original idea. Now, according to Deadline, Snyder is teasing that fans could potentially get a director’s cut of the much-maligned film.
Zack Snyder is dropping hints that he’s releasing a director’s cut of Sucker Punch.
Sucker Punch is a beautiful, confusing, jumbled mishmash of different genres that’s either extremely misogynistic or a feminist masterpiece, depending on who you ask. The film revolves around Babydoll (Emily Browning), a young woman committed to a mental institution by her abusive stepfather after the death of her mother.
Once committed, Babydoll escapes inside her mind by imagining that she’s really in an old-timey Brothel. From there, she fantasizes about going to different fantasy worlds to collect certain items that she needs in order to escape.
The film treads some of the same ground as Inception when it shifts between Babydoll’s different layers of consciousness, but unlike Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-nominated mind-blower, Sucker Punch was largely regarded as a failure upon release. The movie’s rough reception may have been what drove Zack Snyder back to putting his own spin on already-established characters rather than trying to create his own.
Despite already releasing an extended version of Sucker Punch on Blu-ray with an additional 18 minutes of content not shown in theaters, Zack Snyder insists there is still a lot of content from the movie fans have yet to lay their eyes on. Snyder revealed in a recent interview that in the 12 years since the movie’s release, he’s never gotten around to assembling his “director’s cut” but that he’s absolutely still planning on doing so.
The film treads some of the same ground as Inception when it shifts between Babydoll’s different layers of consciousness, but unlike Christopher Nolan‘s Oscar-nominated mind-blower, Sucker Punch was largely regarded as a failure upon release.
The director went on to describe his preferred ending for the film, where it suddenly turns into a musical as Babydoll and her fallen comrades sing a rendition of “O-o-h Child” by the Five Stairsteps. According to Zack Snyder, the studio made him change the ending after execs found it “too weird.” The director himself calls the ending “not optimistic and optimistic at the same time.”
Snyder’s Other Director’s Cuts
Interestingly, a “Snyder cut” of Sucker Punch could be just what critics need to change their minds about the movie. Both the director’s cuts of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice and Zack Snyder’s Justice League were accepted much more positively than their theatrical counterparts.
The whole saga of “Release the Snyder cut!” and the toxicity of so-called “snyder bros” has been well documented, but it doesn’t change the fact that everyone who saw both versions of Justice League thought Snyder’s vision was infinitely more compelling than Joss Whedon’s.
Likewise, even though it wasn’t as big of an event, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (Ultimate Edition) was widely considered a huge improvement over the original version. Critics praised the extended cut as adding more context to scenes that were previously too confusing and making Lex Luthor’s plot much more coherent.
It stands to reason that whatever director’s version of Sucker Punch Zack Snyder has locked away on a hard drive somewhere is going to change a lot of people’s minds about the unfairly maligned movie—if and when he decides to release it.
