The Snyder-Cut Is Basically a 7-Part Miniseries

If you’re a parent of a small child (or even if you’re not), chances are you watch a lot of movies and TV with a kind of start-and-stop regularity. Fifteen minutes of a show on the treadmill in your garage. Twenty minutes on the couch while your kid settles down for the night. Ten minutes after you get out of the shower. Hell, I stretched The Irishman out for like an entire week, and that was before the pandemic.

In a recent interview with the New York Times director Zack Snyder jokingly compared his new cut of Justice League to The Irishman, but also said you could call the superhero team-up, “The Godfather of superhero movies.” This comparison is slightly hilarious when you consider that Marlon Brando played Superman’s father in 1978 and that the first Superman starring Christopher Reeve was written by Mario Puzo, the author of The Godfather. But we digress.

The point is Zack Snyder’s Justice League is long. It’s also rated-R, so you’re not watching this with the kids. This is for you. It is a solid four hours, which makes it one hour longer than Avengers: Endgame, which is something when you consider it has roughly 70 percent fewer superhero characters. (There are still only six members of the Justice League, as opposed to however many billion superheroes appear at the end of Endgame.) But the four-hour version of the critically savaged 2017 film, has been transformed into a 7-part miniseries.

Sure, you could watch the film in one sitting. But, smartly, Zack Snyder and HBO Max have broken up the movie into seven title-cards, each representing about 30-ish minutes worth of the film. These are the chapter titles, which are called “Parts” in the actual film:

1. “Don’t Count on It, Batman”
2. The Age of Heroes.
3. Beloved Mother, Beloved Son.
4. “Change Machine”
5. All the King’s Horses.
6. “Something Darker”
7. Epilogue: “A Father Twice Over”

So there you go. You don’t have to watch all four hours of the Snyder Cut in one sitting. You can watch it for an entire week. And the best part is, those breaks make total sense. Watch in on the couch. Watch it on your phone. Best of all, watch it with any open mind!

Zack Snyder’s Justice League hits HBO Max on Thursday, March 18.