Justice League costumes were so brittle from storage, crew had to ‘tape it together’ for Snyder Cut reshoots

They’ve faced off against Darkseid. They’ve faced off against Steppenwolf. Hell, they’ve even faced off against the Flash’s cheeky one-liners. But one of the biggest challenges that the Justice League had to surmount, apparently, was literally keeping the clothes on their backs.

While completing reshoots for the highly anticipated Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the cast and crew discovered that the costumes had been in storage for so long that they were pretty much starting to fall apart, producer Deborah Snyder reveals to SYFY WIRE.

“It was so great to see everybody again. It was kind of like a reunion, because it's been a while now,” she recalls about getting the gang back together for reshoots, three years after the initial film’s release. But, she adds, it was “also challenging, because the suits were falling apart. They had been in storage. The latex ... we had only three Bat-cowls. Literally the last one — Ben [Affleck] put it on, it tore, and they were like, ‘OK, that's the last one. We have to tape it together.’ They just don't hold up for years in storage, so that was a little challenging.”

Also challenging? Tackling those reshoots during a pandemic. Director Zack Snyder had previously said that this complete overhaul of the 2017 Justice League film — a project he departed following a family tragedy, and eventually completed by Joss Whedon — will feature about four minutes of new footage. The film itself runs a whopping four hours, so four minutes seem like a drop in the bucket. But getting that footage on film required some superheroic wrangling in itself.

“It was really difficult due to the COVID restrictions,” Deborah tells us. “Also, it was at a time where the studios were just figuring out what the protocols were and getting the arrangements with the unions, because everyone wanted to do it safely.”

Not to mention the fact that the cast and crew were scattered and working remotely.

“It was also complicated because everybody, they were all over the place, and we had this ticking clock because we knew we had to get so many visual effects in it,” the producer recalls. “That takes a while to build the assets and to create the shots, because this was from scratch, completely from scratch.”

Credit: HBO Max

Because of the circumstances, the actors had to be shot separately. This required finding some creative ways to get the footage they needed — even when it meant asking one actor to act out his Justice League scenes … while on the set of another movie altogether. That would be Ezra Miller, aka The Flash.

“Ezra was on Fantastic Beasts. He was in England, so we had his film crew pick up a pickup and Zack directed via Zoom,” Deborah explains. “Jared [Leto] was on a different day, and Ben [Affleck]. It was really an undertaking, which was complicated by all the things we had to do for COVID and making sure everyone was safe.”

Zack Snyder’s Justice League drops on March 18 on HBO.