I don’t think anyone has accused Zack Snyder of making new superhero movies that feel particularly light. His Superman wrestled with whether humanity deserved saving. Batman spent Batman v Superman having a full-blown existential crisis. Even when the Justice League finally assembled, he was considerably more interested in dark, brooding heroes with godlike powers than vigilantes grabbing post-battle shawarma. Turns out that difference was very deliberate, as he had ‘no interest’ in what Marvel was doing.
While promoting his release on the 2026 movie calendar, the indie drama The Last Photograph, Snyder spoke with THR about his years making DC movies and why he never tried to emulate the formula that made Marvel Studios such an enormous success. His explanation may be the cleanest description yet of why his universe felt so different from the MCU. He explained:
[Marvel is] like an amusement park ride, right? The ups, the drops, the kind of cruising part, and then another drop. At the end, you’re like, ‘Wow, that was crazy, that was awesome.’ I had no interest in that. And you know, maybe that was a mistake. But I don’t think that way. I can’t do that. I’d rather just kind of talk about the mythology of them. And maybe that’s not as fun.
That last sentence feels particularly revealing. Whether you love the filmmaker’s DC movies or cannot stand them, the man absolutely treated superheroes like mythological figures. Man of Steel spends an enormous amount of time framing Superman as something almost biblical. Batman v Superman turns the arrival of an alien superhero into a debate about gods, fear and power. Zack Snyder’s Justice League runs four hours because apparently resurrecting Superman requires the cinematic breathing room of an ancient epic.
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Marvel was playing with gods too, sometimes literally, but the Rebel Moon director wanted his superheroes to feel carved into the side of a mountain. And he seems aware that the approach came with a cost. His “maybe that was a mistake” comment is funny because, commercially, Marvel’s roller coaster proved awfully difficult to compete with during the years he was building the DCEU. What I find interesting is that this doesn’t sound like he’s rewriting history after leaving DC. Instead, he truly sounds like a man revisiting his past and what may have gone wrong, or right.
Back in 2014, while he was still deep in his run at Warner Bros., the filmmaker described superheroes as modern mythology and argued that these characters could serve the same basic purpose myths once did: helping people understand themselves and the world around them. He also said at the time that he was a fan of Marvel’s movies and liked that DC could offer audiences something different.
That does not mean every choice worked. I remain fascinated by Snyder’s DC run, all of which is streaming with an HBO Max subscription, precisely because there are parts I love and others I will argue about until the Bat-Signal burns out. However, hearing him explain the philosophical split makes those movies make considerably more sense. He was never trying to beat Marvel at Marvel’s game. He was doing something different, wanting his Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman to carry the weight of myth.
These days, DC has moved on under James Gunn and Peter Safran. The Watchmen director admitted he still has not gotten around to watching Gunn’s Superman, though he said he supports Gunn and wants the new DCU to succeed.
Snyder, meanwhile, has stepped far away from capes with The Last Photograph, which was released on September 13. It’s a much smaller movie without the green screens and enormous machinery that defined much of his blockbuster career. Still, after hearing him describe Marvel as a roller coaster, I finally have the simplest explanation for the SnyderVerse.
The MCU was building a sort of Big Thunder Mountain while he was building a cinematic Mount Olympus instead.