Zack Snyder Justice League black and white cut coming — what you need to know

justice league black and white edition
(Image credit: Warner Bros)

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is already getting a follow-up, but it’s not a sequel. Instead it’s a Black and White cut of the movie, which means Zack Snyder is taking his war against color to a whole new level.

The Black and White edition, officially named “Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Justice is Gray” will debut on HBO Max at some point in the future. Unfortunately we don’t know exactly when, only that the movie is “coming soon”. 

The Snyder Cut is already quite a dark movie, and the colors are a lot more unsaturated than they were in the theatrical cut. A lot of Zack Snyder’s movies are like that, and the obvious next step was to stop using color altogether.

In fact, Snyder has gone so far as to claim that the Black and White cut is the “ideal version” of Justice League. Well black and white in IMAX is his ideal version of the movie, which is the “most fan-centric, most pure, most Justice League experience. Because that’s how I lived with the movie for two years, in black and white…”

So releasing the black and white edition seems to be more of a personal thing, rather than for any artistic reasons. Even if it is a trend that’s been cropping up in Hollywood recently. After all, Mad Max: Fury Road, Parasite, and Logan all received black and white re-releases.

What does stripping the color from these movies actually add? There must be something, otherwise the directors wouldn’t do it. But in this case it seems HBO Max is more than happy to humor Zack Snyder, and let him release the black and white edition on its platform. Whether the movie will ever get an IMAX release, with or without color, is another matter entirely.

Serious DC fans will still want to tune in, though. Snyder has confirmed that there is an extended version of Justice League’s ‘Knightmare’ sequence, where Jared Leto’s Joker has some extra lines. Lines that include the infamous “we live in a society” from the penultimate Snyder Cut trailer.

It’s not clear how “soon” we’ll be seeing Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Justice is Gray on HBO Max, but in the meantime you can see a sample of what this cut has to offer courtesy of the Snyder Cut Twitter account:

Tom Pritchard
UK Phones Editor

Tom is the Tom's Guide's UK Phones Editor, tackling the latest smartphone news and vocally expressing his opinions about upcoming features or changes. It's long way from his days as editor of Gizmodo UK, when pretty much everything was on the table. He’s usually found trying to squeeze another giant Lego set onto the shelf, draining very large cups of coffee, or complaining about how terrible his Smart TV is.