After a huge twitter-storm and wave of online petitions initiated and signed by numerous fans of the DC movies and especially film-maker Zack Snyder, the Justice League-Snyder cut got released on March 18.

The petitions had got extra weight when the cast of the Justice league had also expressed their desire of getting back the Snyder-version of the movie portraying the metahumans fight against the greater threat of Darkseid.

While the Snyder cut is available on the HBO Max in the US market, in India, fans can watch it over BookMyShow (BMS) streaming platform. The movie has already gathered more than 31000 pre-orders on the BMS streaming. Twelve days prior to the release date of the Snyder-cut, BMS streaming had started the pre-ordering for the movie.

The Snyder cut of Justice League is being hailed as the rebound of the DC extended Universe under the vision of Zack Snyder.

Large-screen rivalry between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe is not unknown to cinema-lovers. But, the bouncing back of the DCEU with the Snyder-cut driven by demands of countless fans had led the numbers of users of HBO Max to go through the roof when the movie went live. That led HBO servers to crash as the platform was not prepared to handle the sudden increase in the number of the users.

Warner Brothers had initiated the DC-extended universe of movies in 2012-13, with the release of the Superman movie-Man of the Steel. But, the Superman movie was conceptualized as a standalone origin movie, with the renowned filmmaker Christopher Nolan involved in the production and the process of storyboarding. Nolan had helped the movie to be designed in such a way that would consider Superman to be a Superhero in a world with no other superhero.

A prominent executive at the Warner brothers at that time, Jeff Robinov had thrown a subtle hint  that the studios was into a shared-universe storyline building, much like the super successful Marvel Cinematic Universe, MCU of Disney.

The jump to the shared-universe story-building was seen as posing a competition to the MCU. Though the individual standalone movies of the superheroes in the DC extended universe had been brilliant, the movie Justice league released in 2017 was a setback.

Critics observed that roping in the writer-director of the first two Avengers movies, Josh Whedon, after Zack Snyder left, had smacked a bad taste in the movie. Snyder had to leave due to the death of his daughter, to whom he has dedicated the 2021 movie, for which he had done some reshoots in October 2020.

The tastes & tones of MCU and DCEU are different. For example, MCU tries to pack a grief-filled moment or sequence with some amount of humour, but DCEU would serve it in a raw form.

But MCU has its dark-stories like Winter Soldier or the climax revelation of Captain America-Civil War. And DCEU has its moments of carefree comedy in Shazam or in parts of Aquaman. But that comic -relief addition got overboard in Joss Whedon’s Justice league. Hence, many DCEU fans  got upset, and some of them even satirically nicknamed that movie as Josstice league.

These are probably the main reasons why bringing in MCU-experienced Whedon did not pan out well for the 2017 version of JL.

But, following the multiple pushing and Twitter-storm generated by the DCEU fans, the Zack Snyder version of Justice league has finally been released on HBO Max & BMS stream.

The beauty of the Justice league-Zack Snyder cut lies in the execution of the darkness of the theme, and more than that, the super-villain, the Darkseid, hinted in trailers.

In the Josh Whedon-directed Justice league, Darksied was just given a reference through one of his lieutenants- Stepenwolf, whose dreadful nature was also toned down, and was almost comical.

But, that is not the case for the Zack Snyder version, teased in the trailers & TV spots where Stepenwolf is present in all his spiked-up glory, along with others like the De-Saad, another villain.

It is worthwhile to note that the character of the MCU Supervillain-Thanos was inspired from the character sketch of Darkseid. It was because the comic-writers for the DC comics and the Marvel comics used to change employers in the 60s, 70s and 80s, that led to flow of ideas.

The trailer and the TV spots for the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League had successfully heightened up the expectations. Another head-turning addition has been that of the villains-Joker & Deathstroke in the team of Superheroes in a post-apocalyptic setup, which hints towards the level of threat posed by Darksied. To find out what exactly happen in those scenes, fans can watch the movie!!

Will Darkseid succeed? Will he control Superman as feared by Bruce Wayne?

Will Diana face her first defeat?

Will there be a devastating cliff-hanger?

The trailers give enough subtext for such questions.

All fans are hence eagerly waiting to watch the Snyder-cut, with many of them having registered on the streaming platforms.

The movie will probably have answers for the above questions which might be popping up and flooding the minds of the ardent DCEU fans.

As the evil Lex Luthor had said in Arkham, the Bell has been rung; and it cannot be unrung!!!