When Warner Bros. decided to reshoot pretty much all of Henry Cavill's Justice League scenes, he was in the middle of working on Mission: Impossible - Fallout and was rocking a pretty mean looking moustache/beard combo. In order to remove that with the use of special effects, the studio had to spend millions of dollars removed that and gave the British actor a bizarre CGI jaw in the process.
Now, Mission: Impossible - Fallout director Christopher McQuarrie has finally shed some light on what happened behind the scenes and it turns out that the filmmaker made a very reasonable offer to Warner Bros. before Paramount stepped in and decided that the facial hair was going nowhere!
"When the question came - the reshoots for Justice League came out - [Charles] Roven called me, and he said, 'We need your help and we need to shave Henry [Cavill]'s moustache. We need him to come back and we need to do these reshoots.' And I said, 'Look, Chuck, naturally I want to do everything I can to help you, but I also have to think about our production. Let me talk to everybody and figure out what the scheduling would be.' And I went and spoke to Jake Myers, and the suggestion was made through channels that we shave the moustache and Henry could begin to grow the moustache back and that then there would be - they would give us the resources to digitally fill in Henry's moustache. Because like it or not, a fake moustache in close-up on a 75mm lens is never going to look like anything but a fake moustache.
"So, we offered the following compromise: Jake Myers calculated the amount of money that it would take to replace the number of shots, and essentially what Jake was able to project was about a $3 million visual effects budget. So, I don't know how much Henry was in Justice League, I've never seen the movie, but I can tell you how much it would've cost for Mission: Impossible to digitally add Henry Cavill's moustache, and we said yes. We said, here's what we'll do: give us the $3 million and we'll shut down, and that will give Henry Cavill the time to grow his moustache back, and we'll just shut our movie down. ...We said we'll do this, at which point, somebody from Paramount Pictures said, 'What is going on? What are you people even talking about?' They're like, 'There's no way we're going to do that.' We were just like, 'Okay.' That was the best plan that we could come up with."
You can see why Paramount decided not to let this happen, especially as Justice League wasn't their problem and the risks McQuarrie points out in regards to a CGI moustache probably worried studio execs. It's good to know that the filmmaker at least tried, though, and it's a shame things didn't work out because Superman's weird mouth will no forever be a point of ridicule among comic book fans.
ComicBookMovie.com, and/or the user who contributed this post, may earn commissions or revenue through clicks or purchases made through any third-party links contained within the content above.