Zack Snyder was becoming increasingly agitated. Over the course of several weeks in the spring of 2020, the director repeatedly demanded that the names of two producers – Geoff Johns and Jon Berg – be removed from his upcoming re-cut of Justice League, the DC superhero movie that had tanked back in 2017. His high-powered CAA agent began calling Warner Bros. daily to check on why the pair hadn’t been excised from the list of credits. Simultaneously, Snyder’s wife Deborah, another producer on the film, started pressing an executive in the studio’s story department with the same directive. (Snyder admits the couple “asked the studio” to intervene after “a personal plea” to Johns and Berg was ignored.) On June 26, 2020, Snyder had had enough. According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, Snyder confronted an executive in the studio’s postproduction department and issued a threat: “Geoff and Jon are dragging their feet on taking their names off my cut. Now, I will destroy them on social media.”
A toxic social media movement had already been building around the director since at least 2018, spiking with online cries for Warner Bros. to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut of Justice League two years later. As Snyder’s demands escalated behind the scenes — including for more money to finish his four-hour director’s cut of the film for HBO Max and access to intellectual property — so did a flood of attacks aimed at Warner Bros.: calls for boycotts, demands for some executives to be fired, even death threats against them. Fans went after anyone or anything deemed a danger to the so-called SnyderVerse, including directors like Adam Wingard (whose Godzilla vs. Kong launched on HBO Max 13 days after Snyder Cut and stole some of its thunder) and movies like Wonder Woman 1984 (on which Johns was a writer). The onslaught included cyber harassment so severe Warner Bros. security division got involved. (A Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson declined to comment, “as this matter predates the current leadership and new company.”)
And as the mayhem built, many insiders questioned how organic the SnyderVerse legion really was. According to two reports commissioned by WarnerMedia and recently obtained by Rolling Stone, at least 13 percent of the accounts that took part in the conversation about the Snyder Cut were deemed fake, well above the three to five percent that cyber experts say they typically see on any trending topic. (In public filings, Twitter has estimated that the percentage of daily active accounts on its platform that are “false or spam” is less than five percent.) So while Snyder had scores of authentic, flesh-and-blood fans, those real stans were amplified by a disproportionate number of bogus accounts.
Two firms contacted by Rolling Stone that track the authenticity of social media campaigns, Q5id and Graphika, also spotted inauthentic activity coming from the SnyderVerse community. And yet another firm, Alethea Group, found that the forsnydercut.com domain — which claims to have made the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut hashtag go viral in May of 2018, and became the landing hub for efforts to bring Snyder back to the helm of the DC universe — was, at least at one point, registered to a person who also ran a now-defunct ad agency which promoted its ability to bring “cheap, instant Avatar traffic to your website.”
Rolling Stone spoke with more than 20 people involved with both the original Justice League and Snyder’s cut, most of whom believe that the director was working to manipulate the ongoing campaign. Snyder claims that, “if anyone” was pulling strings on the social media fervor, it was Warner Bros. “trying to leverage my fan base to bolster subscribers to their new streaming service.” But one source maintains, “Zack was like a Lex Luthor wreaking havoc.”
For a time, rival studios and digital marketing executives were intrigued by the SnyderVerse…
Read More: How the ‘Justice League’ Snyder Cut Was Driven by Bots & an Ad Agency