Writer Chris Terrio has never really spoken about what Warner Bros. did to Justice League when they hired Joss Whedon to rewrite and reshoot the movie, but in an interview with Vanity Fair, he's finally opened up about his experience.
After praising HBO Max for releasing Zack Snyder's original vision in the "Snyder Cut," he addressed rumours that the studio banned him from the set.
In reality, they just moved on without him once his finished screenplay was delivered (likely in part because of the response to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice), and Terrio expressed his surprise that Snyder was able to shoot that four-hour version of Justice League which was finally released last month. However, he does acknowledge that "There was a mood of fear at the studio."
"My impression was that people in boardrooms started making the decisions. And they were decisions based on arbitrary metrics that had nothing to do with the stories that were being told," he explained. "I rewrote Justice League to lighten the mood a little bit - which became the Zack Snyder Justice League. That’s a slightly lighter, less dense version of the script, which I was fine with. I’m sane, and I will play ball with those kinds of notes."
As for how he felt when Whedon came on board, Terrio says that it "felt like it was some directive that had come from people who are neither filmmakers nor film-friendly - the directive to make the movie under two hours, regardless of what the movie needed to do, and to make the colors brighter, and to have funny sitcom jokes in it."
He never spoke with Whedon, and while he didn't have any bad experiences with Geoff Johns, the writer admitted that "As an executive, you get into very thorny territory when you have a person who’s a writer who also is making executive decisions and sitting in the chair where on other films the writer would have been."
Terrio got to watch Whedon's cut of Justice League a couple of weeks before the movie was released. His reaction? "I immediately called my lawyer and said, 'I want to take my name off the film.' [The lawyer] then called Warner Bros. and told them that I wanted to do that." Unfortunately, with the movie finished, doing so would have delayed its release, a situation Terrio believes "would be an international scandal and news story. So I shut up and I said nothing publicly."
"I’ve never said anything about Justice League since then, but the movie doesn’t represent my work," he added. "I think it would have created a whole wave of negative publicity that I think would’ve made the situation even worse for the actors, and for all the craftspeople who had worked on it, for all kinds of people. But I’m awfully happy that Zack Snyder’s cut of Justice League is the one that is higher on my IMDb page."
As expected, it sounds like Warner Bros. never had a plan for the DC Cinematic Universe, because even as he wrote Justice League, the studio was planning spinoffs without ever consulting with Terrio to better lay the groundwork for future films.
His experience was clearly not a good one, and the writer admits that he's now looking to focus on smaller movies for the time being.