Warner Bros’ Claims About A Bot-Infested Snyder Cut Movement Don’t Really Add Up

Games Warner Bros’ Claims About A Bot-Infested Snyder Cut Movement Don’t Really Add Up Paul Tassi Senior Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. News and opinion about video games, television, movies and the internet. New! Follow this author to improve your content experience.

Got it! Jul 19, 2022, 08:29am EDT | New! Click on the conversation bubble to join the conversation Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Justice League DC Rolling Stone just published a massive article that goes into detail about a report that Warner Bros. commission to dig into the #ReleasetheSnyderCut movement, the online campaign that did, eventually, get Warner Bros. to release Zack Snyder’s full version of Justice League.

The conclusion the pieces draws, and the headline, is that the movement was helped by a large number of bots. My first though on reading that was “I mean of course,” as any mass, hashtag-based campaign probably is going to be, but reading the actual piece, the claims feel pretty overblown, and a lot of this feels like sour grapes on Warner Bros’ end from their dealings with Snyder and his fans. The main takeaway from the piece is that two reports commissioned by WB said that around 13% of #ReleasetheSnyderCut movement accounts were bots.

While that’s more than double the Twitter average of 5% (though if you ask Elon Musk, it’s more than that), that still does not…sound like all that much in context here. If 87% of the Snyder folks were real, that’s pretty significant, and I don’t think that warrants the takeaway that WB was duped into greenlighting the Snyder Cut with an inauthentically large fanbase massively inflated by bots. That’s really not what the data is showing here.

This isn’t to say the movement is some paragon of pure fan love. The Snyder Cut folks can be absolutely brutal , certainly to WB execs, as mentioned in the piece, but I mean, to essentially anyone that dares question the brilliance of Snyder’s work, or even hint in that direction (I’ve done battle with them a number of times for extremely innocuous takes). It also very much seems like Snyder enjoyed this movement being built up around him and did wield it to apply pressure when he needed to.

One quote in the piece credits him saying that he would “destroy” Geoff Jons and Jon Berg on social media unless their names were taken off the Snyder Cut of Justice League. Justice League WB MORE FOR YOU ‘Demon Slayer’ Season 2 Finally Has An Actual 2021 Release Date Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’ Season 2 Not A Sure Thing, Says Director ‘Genshin Impact’ Still Refuses To Increase Anniversary Rewards, Despite Fan Outcry That said, it’s hard to fault Snyder himself for being pretty bitter. Lest we forget what actually happened with Justice League, Snyder left the project to deal with an unspeakable family tragedy, it was given to accused harasser Joss Whedon who both made a deeply bad movie and got in extensive confrontations with Snyder’s friends and coworkers in the cast.

And there are some very real issues with WB higher-ups during this whole process (see the Ray Fisher saga), and I think Snyder’s position in the article is probably the correct one, that WB eventually caved not to the Snyder Cut movement not because of immense online pressure, but as a way to attempt to drive HBO Max subscriptions, which is where the film premiered. They were “trying to leverage my fan base to bolster subscribers to their new streaming service,” Snyder said. It’s a messy situation but I don’t think the message being crafted here by WB’s camp with this “leak” that turned into an article is doing them any favors.

The claim seems to be that the Snyder movement was a few loud fans using a bot army to bully a major studio into releasing a cut of a movie. This is the conclusion the Rolling Stone piece draws: “That means a fandom amplified by fake accounts helped shake down a major studio — at an ultimate cost to Warner Bros. of more than $100 million — to re-release a movie that had already bombed years earlier.

” In reality, that movement (though often hostile) was very much mostly real people, and it’s disingenuous to think that the Snyder Cut was released for any other reason besides WB thinking it could earn them revenues and subscribers. Snyder may occasionally go a bit overboard with the social media power he wields, but he’s not really wrong in terms of the genesis for how all this started, and why it unfolded the way it did. The story WB is selling here just doesn’t track.

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