Why the Zack Snyder hatred is actually fear

A decent sized group of people on social media are legitimately fearful of Zack Snyder. 

They’ll never admit it, and if you suggest it to them they’ll scoff at it and call you a cultist, but it’s real and right in front of our eyes with everything that they do to show it. 

The toxic hatred attached to Zack Snyder’s name whenever seemingly anything is announced, suggested or quoted is well documented. You don’t need to even search far and wide for tweets about it, a simple search of his name will provide you all the evidence you need from just about any day on the calendar for at least the past four years. 

Why does it exist? Where did it come from? What do these comic creators, bloggers, YouTubers and fanboys get out of constantly finding the laziest, libelous and most reprehensible forms of virtue signaling takes to hurl at him and his body of work? Especially considering how well respected Snyder is by his professional peers and just about everyone he has ever worked with from below the line grips and stuntmen to multi-million dollar actors? 

It’s because Zack Snyder represents almost everything that his haters outright fear about the future of the movie industry. 

Now, when you see mutuals respond on Twitter to the hatred, when they quote tweet people you’ve never heard of that claim “no one” cares about Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the money being spent on the budget would be better served going to COVID-19 vaccine research, or just that he’s a no talent hack who hates his mother and inspires the worst in humanity, your first instinct might be to tell them not to feed the trolls. Yes, a decent part of the behavior from these people is simply for attention, and more specifically hate marketing. Thousands of Twitter accounts and YouTube channels build entire audiences based on anger and hatred, because it’s easier to tear anything down and revel in the destruction than it is to build something up and enjoy the happiness. 

The problem is that even if we stopped giving these trolls attention for their hate-filled rantings, they would still be spewing their bile because it represents a deep seated concern they all have for the movie and entertainment industry itself. 

If you look closer at the people who trash Snyder on a regular basis, you begin to see patterns and things they all have in common that very clearly explain why they are all terrified of the very existence of his career. 

First, there’s the comic creators. They’ve hated him arguably since 2013 when Man of Steel first graced the big screens, because his take on Superman wasn’t the family friendly, saving cats out of trees while wearing red trunks version that they wanted to see. It doesn’t matter if the version of Superman they or their peers wrote fit that version either, they simply have an iron clad expectation for how Superman is supposed to be represented in movies, and when Snyder  openly defied that and made a movie that not only dug deep into the roots of the Superman mythos, but also the moral questions about the existence of his character, they considered it an insult to everything they hold dear about Superman, at least from the cinematic perspective. This is why you see them talk about how Superman is supposed to be above everyone else and be the shining example of what humanity can hopefully be, instead of an actual grounded character that was raised by humans and is just as flawed as anyone else, but with his abilities is trying to do the right thing by humanity, while rising above to become its greatest hero. 

For some reason, these creators consider the “human” approach to the character completely wrong. Well, it’s not for “some reason,” it’s actually because of jealousy. On some level, a lot of them are mad that they didn’t think of it first, because they know it’s a high concept about the character that even though it has been done in the comics, hasn’t received the attention or the notoriety that Man of Steel, or Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has received since 2016. So some of these creators are thinking “he gets more attention for his one movie than I’ve gotten for one of my best runs and that’s just not fair.” 

This leads into the next group of people that fear Zack Snyder: the failed movie makers turned critics of everything in life. 

This is arguably the most toxic of Snyder’s haters because for them it’s not just about jealousy over his career, it’s also about his impact on everything they don’t want to see change in Hollywood. You look at these YouTubers and bloggers that drag him every chance they get and you see so many of them with “aspiring director” or “passionate film student” in their bio, or maybe they even have tiny film credits from lower than indie level films and indie level films, along with demo reels that quite frankly wouldn’t be good enough to enter a student film contest, let alone qualify them to comment on anything Snyder has ever done. 

Those people have spent years working, wishing, hoping for a break to get on the ground floor of where Snyder has been for well over a decade now, and whether it’s because the system never acknowledged their work, or they’re just not very good, or both, they’re on Twitter and YouTube frustrated and angsty because they’ll never have what Snyder has in the way of a demonstrable career in filmmaking. So they take the old adage of “those who can’t do, teach,” except they’re not very good teachers, and they let the bitterness get in the way of their work. Constantly. 

What makes it worse for them is knowing that Snyder has a fanbase, a strong and loud fanbase that greatly appreciates his work and in many circles deifies him, in much the same way that film elitists deify Akira Kurosawa, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick or Martin Scorsese to name just a few. 

“So it’s bad enough that this guy has everything we’ll never get in Hollywood, now he’s got more fans appreciating him too? We can’t just let him get away with that, can we? He must be denounced! He is the scum of the earth because that’s supposed to be MY career, MY multi-million dollar comic book movies about MY favorite heroes, and those should be MY fans willing to openly attack others on social media just to defend ME!”

You can’t call them out on this because they’ll just deny it, and that bitterness and angsty attitude prominently displayed in a sea of red hair and neckbeards has attracted the dregs of social media to give them their own acolytes, who share and revel in their hatred of everything they don’t and will never have that this “no talent hack” was just “given” by WB years ago…...and they DESPISE that he’s a “fan,” just like they are. If he was some level of elitist, snobby prick that didn’t read comics and never had an inkling of energy for the medium itself, he would be easier to dismiss because he wouldn’t be relatable to a lot of mutuals, but since he’s a devout fan of the source material and has the same grand and glorious ideas for it that people argue with you in detail on Facebook about, it’s even worse because he has the same passion and determination that they have had their whole lives. He’s just better at making it happen than they are. A lot better. 

And there’s the last group: the people who depend on how Hollywood has worked for years and don’t want to see it change. The failed movie makers are part of this group as well, but even those who are more successful join in at this point. If you’re someone that has paid some level of dues to try and make it in Hollywood, and you’ve inserted yourself into its system so strongly that you are comfortable with how it runs and take its operational status as gospel, then the last thing you want is for that all to change just because fans have social media megaphones and the general audience is cutting the cord en masse. 

The thing is, that’s what is happening right now as The Streaming Wars rage on and historically prominent studios like WB, Universal and Disney are giving way to Netflix, Amazon and Apple among others in terms of where and how movies are made going forward. Before the pandemic, the shift had already started and the idea of making a movie through the traditional Hollywood system, which in many ways is treacherous and has seen a lot of passionate ideas hit the cutting room floor with a thud, is giving way to a more open and in a number of ways progressive approach to moviemaking on streaming services. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated that and threatens the future of movie theaters as well, much sooner than any of us truly expected. 

What does any of that have to do with Zack Snyder? Well, he’s neck deep in it. As a result of what happened in 2016 and 2017 with his DC films, most notably the infamous Justice League disaster, he’s migrated to Netflix for Army of the Dead, and now is being given a reported $70 million to rebuild Justice League into the vision he originally sought to create with WB…...as a streaming show for HBO Max. 

“Terrific. So now the guy who gets to play in our sandbox with our heroes and have the career we’ll never have is also working for the forces that want to change Hollywood altogether and completely dismiss all the crap I’ve spent my life wading through just to get some acknowledgement? This guy is seriously the antichrist and I hate him with everything I have in my blackened, hollowed out husk where a soul used to be.” 

Seriously, this is how they think and feel about Zack Snyder on a regular basis. He stole their dream jobs they were never good enough to get, he’s embracing the forces that want to push the old Hollywood system they depend on out the door, and people love him for all of it. 

See why they hate him so much and try everything they can to make him some problematic lothario? He is literally a threat to their way of life as far as they are concerned, and they must take every shot they can to bring him down because if he ultimately succeeds, they ultimately lose. This is why all three of these groups, represented as bitter and selfish comic book creators, angsty failed filmmakers and old Hollywood opportunists and executives, all come together using Twitter, YouTube, sources in the trades and blogs to smear Snyder’s name three ways from Sunday, because the voices that represent the future of the industry, namely AT&T and the audience itself, are giving him an audience and they simply cannot handle that. 

The irony of this is that in many ways The Matrix, a classic WB movie and my favorite of all time, is a perfect metaphor for this whole situation. When Morpheus explains to Neo how people plugged into the system behave, he says “Most of these people are not ready to be unplugged, and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.” 

That’s what you’re seeing with all this hate toward Zack Snyder. He is their “Neo,” and they are so hopelessly dependent on the old system of Hollywood in every facet that they will fight to protect it. 

That’s just a metaphor, I’m not deifying him myself. Crazy how that works out though, doesn’t it?