A fan campaign that successfully got Warner Bros. to release the extended version of Zack Snyder’s “Justice League” may have been helped out by a fake army.
The sometimes vicious Twitter movement was made up of at least 13% bots, according to data compiled by Rolling Stone Monday, significantly more than the less than 5% of fake accounts the social media site claims to have.
Warner Bros. reportedly commissioned two different studies on the origins of the campaign, which began from an account called @daniras_ilust, which shared a meme showing the decapitated heads of “Justice League” producer Geoff Johns, DC Films President Walter Hamada and Toby Emmerich, the former chairman of Warner Bros. Pictures Group chairman, according to Rolling Stone.
From there, the fan outrage at the studio grew with claims that they were burying Snyder’s real and true version of the superhero movie.
It’s not quite clear who was behind the campaign. Snyder blamed Warner Bros., saying they were trying to ramp up engagement and subscriptions. Sources told Rolling Stone that Snyder was at the very least egging it on.
“Zack was like a Lex Luthor wreaking havoc,” one anonymous source told the magazine.
Whoever it was succeeded: the Snyder Cut was released in March 2021, a more than four-hour remake of the original version taken over by Joss Whedon after Snyder left during postproduction following the death of his daughter. The sprawling epic, starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Ray Fisher, Jason Momoa and Ezra Miller, was met with mostly positive reviews, if not complaints about the length.
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