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The Snyder Cut

Morgan

Well-known Member
Premium
Xen-Ace 2021

Rolling Stone: Exclusive: Fake Accounts Fueled the ‘Snyder Cut’ Online Army

A WarnerMedia report reveals that bots and other inauthentic users bolstered the fan-led campaign for director Zack Snyder’s Justice League do-over​

Surprise, surprise. Now that the Snyder Cut is coming out on digital, Rolling Stone published a hit piece "revealing" that the Snyder Cut campaign was run by bots.

Filled with such baffling decisions as accusing Fiona Zheng of being a bot account or a Red Scare-type spy/catfisher wearing "digital yellowface", when she's actually been interviewed during DC Fandome and the side purporting themselves to be "progressives/leftists" made fun of her because of her accent.

It’s unclear who, precisely, is behind the site. Four participants are listed there as its developers, including a self-identified fan and site founder who purports to be from China named Fiona Zheng. The site was originally registered using a privacy service in December 2017, but web registration records show that, during a brief lapse in the privacy protection from mid-March to mid-October 2021, a digital marketing consultant named Xavier Lannes was listed as the registrant of forsnydercut.com.

[...]

Snyder denies knowing or ever hiring Lannes; Lannes did not respond to a request for comment. Zheng, meanwhile, despite prolific tweeting about Snyder from 2016 up until the day of the Snyder Cut’s release in 2021, has posted just twice since then. A query to Zheng went unanswered.
The above implies Fiona Zheng isn't "really" Chinese and also seems to have "stopped existing" past the release of the Snyder Cut.

Also:

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the two reports "cited" in the hit piece were "commissioned by WarnerMedia" except WarnerMedia no longer exists due to the merger and Toby Emmerich is already gone from the company, making this a blatant admission that they were sitting on this information and held to it until the "right moment" to try and cause damage and generate clicks. They really thought they had something.
 

berto

I Saw the Devil
Moderator
bots and other inauthentic users bolstered the campaign
Yeah, I heard about this. Thing is, even if that was the case, which I don't doubt any small number of bots can be involved in anything online these days, including the counter campaign that argued that the Snyder cut did not exist, how do you account for the numbers of viewership of said film. Movie crashed the servers of HBO Max upon release, it's made record numbers across the globe and I think the 4K and regular BluRay did pretty well. Were all those bots, too? If so, then who cares? They're bringing in the bank.
 

Morgan

Well-known Member
Premium
Xen-Ace 2021
Yeah, I heard about this. Thing is, even if that was the case, which I don't doubt any small number of bots can be involved in anything online these days, including the counter campaign that argued that the Snyder cut did not exist, how do you account for the numbers of viewership of said film. Movie crashed the servers of HBO Max upon release, it's made record numbers across the globe and I think the 4K and regular BluRay did pretty well. Were all those bots, too? If so, then who cares? They're bringing in the bank.
Not to mention the naked fact of how embarrassing it would be for WB to admit that they were essentially "tricked" into releasing a movie that "didn't exist" because, uhhh, a bunch of bots told them to do it, I guess. And the bots apparently had better sense than an entire corporation's marketing department, since the Snyder Cut pushed 2.7M new subs onto the HBO Max service and made them hit a milestone that they weren't expecting to hit until Q4 2023, a literal 3 years later. And instead of celebrating their other successes like The Batman, or focusing on their future projects like Black Adam, etc., they're still hanging onto bullshit from a movie whose parody officially released five years ago.

Plus, remember the time when you could search on Twitter and find identical posts back-to-back-to-back about how the Batman vs Superman movie would be a "tracking shot of all the DC characters crying in the rain"? Here, let me pull it up, and stop me when you get sick of it:

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FX_41eCX0AAW3dY


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Yeah, there was a quantifiable manufactured bot campaign concerning Snyder properties. It was to hate the movies as they came out.
 

berto

I Saw the Devil
Moderator
Not to mention the naked fact of how embarrassing it would be for WB to admit that they were essentially "tricked" into releasing a movie that "didn't exist" because, uhhh, a bunch of bots told them to do it, I guess. And the bots apparently had better sense than an entire corporation's marketing department, since the Snyder Cut pushed 2.7M new subs onto the HBO Max service and made them hit a milestone that they weren't expecting to hit until Q4 2023, a literal 3 years later. And instead of celebrating their other successes like The Batman, or focusing on their future projects like Black Adam, etc., they're still hanging onto bullshit from a movie whose parody officially released five years ago.

Plus, remember the time when you could search on Twitter and find identical posts back-to-back-to-back about how the Batman vs Superman movie would be a "tracking shot of all the DC characters crying in the rain"? Here, let me pull it up, and stop me when you get sick of it:

FX_41eKX0AAGWzb


FX_41eCX0AAW3dY


FX_41d9WQAAjtzT


FX_41eJWYAAp778


FYBBnmWWYAEZDf4


Yeah, there was a quantifiable manufactured bot campaign concerning Snyder properties. It was to hate the movies as they came out.
Fascinating. All of those fake accounts are 'women.' Generally pretty ones , too. I would assume it's because they'd hope that they could use these proverbial women to embarrass or flatter people into whatever opinion they're pushing.

There really is a blatant double standard going on here. I won't pretend Snyder is one of the greats, that he can do no wrong and all his works are masterpieces but when he gets it right it is outstanding. Looking at that, others can, and have, done worse than him and yet they don't get this kind of scourged earth treatment. I don't know who's grandma he ran over but from here it looks like WB just won't let go.
 

Morgan

Well-known Member
Premium
Xen-Ace 2021
Looking at that, others can, and have, done worse than him and yet they don't get this kind of scourged earth treatment. I don't know who's grandma he ran over but from here it looks like WB just won't let go.
Given his track record with the people he's worked with and how down they are to working with him again, chances are that he helped someone's grandma cross the street and didn't run her over even once, but WB and their supporters still hate him because he showed them up. And let's be real: dude lifts. Dude's a damn chad. That grandma would've had a great time holding onto him. I'm just saying. Purported "breadtubers" are literally mad because he's physically fit and calling the fact that action stars have defined muscles "body fascism".

The Rolling Stone accuses him of being a Lex Luthor-type supervillain and vowing to "destroy [WB] on social media", even though he largely uses Vero and not Twitter, which doesn't indicate a strong social media presence by his own choosing. Tatiana Siegel, the author of that hit piece, was formerly at The Hollywood Reporter and had a rivalry with Kim Masters (respected journalist), and Siegel left because she couldn't successfully obstruct Masters's piece that exposed Joss Whedon and the toxic work environment Whedon fostered during JL. WarnerMedia is still trying to push the narrative that Snyder is some puppetmaster manipulating Ray Fisher to make his statements against their blatantly unprofessional conduct. WB even let slide how degenerates made (and probably continue to make) fun of Autumn Snyder's suicide, like she purposely did it because Zack's a "bad father"/made a bad movie.

WB emboldened the haters into believing they have full license to slap given undesirable political leanings on Snyder to paint him as a boogeyman who also "destroyed" their precious fictional characters. He "doesn't understand" them. He "ruined" them. They sit around sobbing on Twitter about "we gave him SUPERMAN!" because the natural state of human existence now is to treat corporate IP like an identity-defining religion and different interpretations are on the level of blasphemy. Superman is never allowed to have doubt because he must be the paternalistic arbiter of the status quo who tells people everything is okay and exercises his power in a way they like, even if the people he should be saving are being exploited every day in other ways or simply not cared about. They're so unimaginative that if Snyder existed with his takes 70 years ago, they'd have called him a Communist, not a Right-Winger. He's whatever the current reactionary climate disagrees with at the time, and none of their arguments existed before March 2016.

Meanwhile, there's Joss Whedon, known sex pest and serially abusive person who somehow finds a way to have every powerful woman in his story suffer a rape scene, and openly makes fun of an actress's accent and proficiency with English when he wants to deflect from his tyrannical behavior. But it's okay, because he claims to be a "progressive" "feminist" male. So even if he does all that and isn't even subtle about it, and weirdly implicitly admits that he killed a child when he was young, and says the quiet part out loud re: liberalism's purpose being to pacify the poor so that they don't have to be put down like the mindless hordes of a zombie apocalypse, he's apparently worth defending on a corporate level by WB's executives and fandom at large, and only openly blamed just enough for when WB needs to deflect from something. And it's okay, because he wrote a "good show" once, and you have to "separate the art from the artist". Whedon could straight up be a pedophile and people would be willing to "separate the art from the artist", because something-something Firefly and something-something Buffy.

But you see, Zack Snyder committed the crime of making Superman vulnerable and not an infallible paternalistic force that makes Americans feel comfortable in their exceptionalism. Snyder shines an appropriately villainous light on what's essentially Batman's regular behavior in comics, but instead of the completely goonish idea that Batman has a "no-kill code" (cue a supercut of every time Batman takes actions that are obviously fatal to anyone with a brain, including during the Nolanverse and the current Reeves movie) or the idea that if he kills a single criminal, he's as point-blank irredeemable as the Joker or whoever even though he's A) already acting outside the law, and B) works with cops who uuhhhhhhh have been extrajudicially killing people for the past however many years now, instead Snyder and his team suggest that Batman kills people and it's wrong of him to carelessly project his paranoia on Superman while turning a blind eye to Luthor being the bigger evil, but he's ultimately able to make amends for his moral transgressions. People didn't like this, therefore Snyder must be a horrendous person to the core and on every level, and these haters must announce it at every opportunity.
 

Foxtrot94

Elite Hunter
Premium
how do you account for the numbers of viewership of said film.

Just because something illegitimate ends up being successful, that doesn't make it legitimate. In fact, that'd be the whole purpose of this operation. To artificially raise such a fuss that the word spreads enough to garner interest from actual people in flesh and bone.

First of all, the fact that this kind of means had to be used to bolster interest in Hack Snyder's cut of JL is already shameful in and of itself. Second, he doesn't get a pass for that just because the fraudulent campaign achieved its goal. If anything, quite the opposite.

The funniest part of all this to me, though, is how these Snyder bots (and this time I'm not using that word in the literal sense) are now using the success of the Snyder Cut as ammo to argue that his previous flicks like BvS were actually secretly good and misunderstood. LOL. I just got off finishing reading a post of this nature on FB. Like "See? See? His JL was fire! Lemme now explain to you all, with incredible mental gymnastics and rationalization after the fact, how BvS was absolute genius and how JL proves it!". I'm seeing a lot of these pathetic attempts to redeem bad movies recently. The SW prequels are apparently now good just because the sequels were worse, BvS is now good cause JL was a success, even freaking Eternals now for some reason "have incredible chemistry as a family because the Avengers didn't feel like one" (?????). The internet is so amusing sometimes.
 
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berto

I Saw the Devil
Moderator
Just because something illegitimate ends up being successful, that doesn't make it legitimate
That is some odd phrasing.

flicks like BvS were actually secretly good and misunderstood.
Well, as a matter of fact, I happen to love BvS (namely the Director's Cut) and think it is misunderstood. That, however, has always been the case. It has no relation to the success of the SC. Do I think it's perfect? No, not at all. There is plenty to criticize and it should be called on its shortcomings. However, I also find a lot of the criticisms to be illegitimate. That, because of some aspects of the film are bad, bad enough for people to dislike it, that all of the film is, too. In the internet there is no gray. Everyone rages to blinging white or abyss black. You have to be an extremist or you belong nowhere. Your opinion is null void. Well, sorry, but no. I love BvS. It has a great deal of shortcomings but they are outshined by its high points.

The SW prequels are apparently now good just because the sequels were worse
I heard about this one. I'm not big on SW but I do have standard nerd knowledge on it. I think in the grand scheme of things the prequels have 'aged' better? They're not good but they're not without merit, either. I think that in reality this is a lesser of two evils situation and, as I said, you can't take things as they are, you must go to the extremes. The sequels were not good because of the way they handle the source material so the extreme of that is that they are the worst works of cinema ever made. Because the prequels do this better, thus, they've aged better within the franchise, they must be better, thus, the extreme of that is that they are amongst the great works of science fiction. Nothing is taken as it is. Everything must be the extreme of whatever side of the tree you hang with in the internet.
 

Foxtrot94

Elite Hunter
Premium
That is some odd phrasing.

You know what I mean. Can't excuse a fraud just because said fraud ultimately put together a good/successful movie.

I've been seeing quite a bit of this in defense of the whole bot affair. Dishonesty is apparently justifiable as long as the product that comes out is good. I betcha these people would be singing another song if the Snyder Cut was considered still trash. That ain't how it works.
 

BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups!
The funniest part of all this to me, though, is how these Snyder bots (and this time I'm not using that word in the literal sense) are now using the success of the Snyder Cut as ammo to argue that his previous flicks like BvS were actually secretly good and misunderstood. LOL. I just got off finishing reading a post of this nature on FB. Like "See? See? His JL was fire! Lemme now explain to you all, with incredible mental gymnastics and rationalization after the fact, how BvS was absolute genius and how JL proves it!". I'm seeing a lot of these pathetic attempts to redeem bad movies recently.
While I don't "hate" BvS, I don't have much lover for it either. I still love Man of Steel and have little problems with most of the DCU. Bring on Black Adam and Aquaman 2! Shazam 2 as well. I am not seeing Flashpoint. Screw off WB, and you are all cowardly crooks for cancelling Batgirl!

The SW prequels are apparently now good just because the sequels were worse, BvS is now good cause JL was a success, even freaking Eternals now for some reason "have incredible chemistry as a family because the Avengers didn't feel like one" (?????). The internet is so amusing sometimes.
People are entitled their own opinions, but I hate idiots who act like jackasses by putting there entire worth in to an opinion for the sake of validation, acting like a dick, and trying to pathetically one up others for having a different opinion. It ain't just idiotic fan boy and fan girls with this problems. Anti-Fans or web critics such as Nostalgia Critic (Channel Awesome in general; especially before the fallout), Cinema Sins, RedLetterMedia, and even Honest Trailers suffered from this.

As far as SW Prequel Trilogy goes, I fond the trilogy mediocre overall with one good, but flawed movie. Episode I is a 6/10, Episode II is a 3/10, and Episode III is a 7/10 for me. The Clone Wars TV series does the prequel stories better justice and has more believable writing overall.
 

Morgan

Well-known Member
Premium
Xen-Ace 2021
Screw off WB, and you are all cowardly crooks for cancelling Batgirl!
The WB of before is dead. The cancellation was done by Warner Bros Discovery, who isn't beholden to the bullshit decisions of WB playing identity politics and expecting fanfare off of racelifts and side characters instead of mainliners. What sense does it make to have a 70-year old Batman don the cowl for older millennial nostalgia bait and serve as side character to his own sidekick before we actually got a DCEU Batman movie? Or a DCEU with a Supergirl and no Superman, because Superman was reportedly going to be killed as a baby in the Flash movie? We're living in the same universe where people didn't see the sense in dropping the Venom movie without a Spider-Man, right? But they were gonna have a Supergirl with no Superman and a geriatric Batman without even the respect to do it as a Batman Beyond story. Right.

The Batgirl directors had no idea why JK Simmons was playing Gordon (a Snyder casting) while Keaton was playing Batman (a Burton casting), or even where it sat in the Multiverse, but yeah. Totally sensible to tease a "spaghetti of Multiverses" that even they have no clue how it worked, that seems to exist solely because of another movie (The Flash) starring a batsh#t crazy actor who starts fights left and right, terrorized Hawaii, runs a weed farm and has children around unsecured guns, and claims to be "transgender nonbinary" when stopped by a cop.

Now checkmarks on Twitter are malding and calling David Zaslav a racist sexist transphobe for cancelling this movie, as if the WB of old (or the Twitter liberals themselves) ever genuinely cared about "representation" given that they were too busy calling Ray Fisher a diva or a Snyder puppet, ignored Snyder's pitch for a solo Ryan Choi movie, were glad he couldn't feature John Stewart in ZSJL, didn't say a peep about the Rick Famuyiwa-directed Flash movie featuring Cyborg, and other headassery. The only thing they have to say is "This Batgirl movie made Babs a Latina! There was a transgender side character! Representation!!", nothing to say about the actual story or trailers, they didn't even blink at the total lack of coverage of the movie during SDCC, and are now tweeting more about it in the last 48 hours (manufactured outrage) than they ever did in the time it's been worked on, including whenever Joss Whedon was on board to write for it.

We still have Blue Beetle, who's an actual Latino hero and whose movie is going to be a "bombastic" theater exclusive like WBD wants, not a lower-budget-but-still-inflated straight-to-HBO streaming fare that made Batgirl's costume look right out of the CW. But they're not talking about Blue Beetle or the representation he brings. Huh. Wonder why. They're instead actually pushing for an "irredeemable" movie with poor screenings to be released, when before they were concern trolling about how "the Cult" should stop bullying a corporation for a movie that wasn't even "complete", and that the funding that went into the Snyder Cut could've been used for philanthropic reasons. Funny how that works. It's almost like everything they said was solely because they hated Snyder.

Anyway, Ben Affleck was in reshoots for Aquaman 2.
 

BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups!
The WB of before is dead. The cancellation was done by Warner Bros Discovery, who isn't beholden to the bullshit decisions of WB playing identity politics and expecting fanfare off of racelifts and side characters instead of mainliners.
I honestly didn't know about the merger, until the day it was announced Batgirl was canceled. Either way, they can still f#ck off.

Anyway, Ben Affleck was in reshoots for Aquaman 2.
I've heard and I'm happy for Ben affleck, but I'm here for Aquaman. Not some cameo to keep everything connected and remind people the DCEU still exists. I know it exists. I watch these heroes, anti-heroes, and villains to go beyond Batman and Superman. Also don't mind a live-action Green Lantern done right. For now though, the animated movies are more than enough. I still got to see the most recent one. I'll probably order it on Amazon later today.
 

Morgan

Well-known Member
Premium
Xen-Ace 2021
I honestly didn't know about the merger, until the day it was announced Batgirl was canceled. Either way, they can still f#ck off.
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Being mad that a movie this incomprehensible got cancelled is like being genuinely upset Morbius is bad.

Just wait for a competently made film to do justice to the character instead of being excited for soulless corporate manure that was made just to deflect from how they treated the actors of Justice League.
 

BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups!
Being mad that a movie this incomprehensible got cancelled is like being genuinely upset Morbius is bad.
I don't care. I was invested and curious. I have family that knew about the Batgirl movie, but rarely or never keep up with movies news, so I got to drop the bombshell on them. I wanted to see the film live or die by its own merits. Not being canceled for some dumb tax write off, and because of fickle "test audiences". Morbius I give 0 f#cks about, and it might as well not even exist on my plane of existence.

ust wait for a competently made film to do justice to the character instead of being excited for soulless corporate manure that was made just to deflect from how they treated the actors of Justice League.
Whenever that happens. You can only wait so long. If it's animated, I don't mind, but there are people that want see a live-action done justice, and I do not blame them for their anger.
 

Morgan

Well-known Member
Premium
Xen-Ace 2021
I don't care. I was invested and curious. I have family that knew about the Batgirl movie, but rarely or never keep up with movies news, so I got to drop the bombshell on them.
So you were invested but didn't know anything about who was behind it? I literally just mentioned people that were fake outraged about this cancellation that never said a peep when Joss Whedon was on it since 2017 and stepped down in 2018 because he "couldn't think of an idea". I talked about that in page 3. Where were you then with your "investment" and "curiosity"?

Whenever that happens. You can only wait so long. If it's animated, I don't mind, but there are people that want see a live-action done justice, and I do not blame them for their anger.
Yeah, and? They're not obligated to have a movie come out just because they're ignorant and claim to be "fans" while having no concept of quality control.
 

BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups!
So you were invested but didn't know anything about who was behind it?
I read some stuff, but I didn't constantly keep up the date. I'm not like those other people who have to constantly know and feed on upcoming news/rumors on games and films. I have a life like anyone else. I heard there was a Batgirl movie, and was interested in seeing it. Not that hard to figure out.

Yeah, and? They're not obligated to have a movie come out just because they're ignorant and claim to be "fans" while having no concept of quality control.
Actually they are. The moment they announced it, did all that filming, and wasted that money, they were obligated to do it. The only reason they don't want to do it is, because of laziness and a tax loophole. End of discussion. You don't like it, not my problem. I'm not arguing over this on a constant back and forth.
 
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berto

I Saw the Devil
Moderator
I am so ambivalent about this whole thing. I have lost interest in the DC film brand and really only watch them as individual experiences. I have no investment on any of them anymore since why I got into it in the first place has been discarded. It's not quite DmC all over again since I knew the Snyder Cut could very well be a one off deal with no future but a similar set up. What I was promised with that trillogy is no more but it's not as though there is no entertainment to be found, just no real investment on them or the future of it all from me, so not quite as tragic as DmC was since I've had time to let it go. I might watch them on streaming, if it looks ok enough I might see it in theatres, but, Just like with Marvel now, I don't care enough about most of this to have an opinion on Batgirl being canceled or Snyder Cut'd. Really, though, I might never own a DC movie on Blu-ray again.

I will say this, though, Pierce Brosnan as Doctor Fate is brilliant casting. That premise alone deserves its own movie. Won't happen since Dr Strange is too close a premise to market it well but that I would pay to see.
 
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Foxtrot94

Elite Hunter
Premium
Well, they flat out came out now and stated they want copy Marvel (gee, we totally couldn't figure that out before, though I appreciate the intellectual honesty now). I think it's always been a bad idea cause they're really bad at building a universe, with Snyder and without. Imo they should focus on doing what they do best and make individual projects not tied to a universe or whatever, they're way better at that and it would offer a different kind of experience than what Marvel offers.

On the other hand, their phase 4 is just as terrible as the Snyderverse so I guess at least WB picked a good time to rethink their DCEU. If they're so determined to beat Marvel at their own game, now's the time to do it.
 

BrawlMan

Lover of beat'em ups!
I don't care enough about most of this to have an opinion on Batgirl being canceled or Snyder Cut'd. Really, though, I might never own a DC movie on Blu-ray again.
That is more than fair enough. Though like I said before last year, I don't give a damn about the Snyder Cut, and wanted the DCEU to move beyond Zack Snyder. Go beyond Batman and Superman. A majority of the projects were just doing that. I know about the reshoots with Afleck, on Aquaman 2, but I am not here for him. I am there to see Jason Mamoa as Aqauman! I am not giving up on Marvel or DC altogether, but WB I am ****ed at, and most of the MCU does not have my interest at the moment, aside from Wakanda Forever. I'll still get superhero movies on home video when I like and enjoy them.

On the other hand, their phase 4 is just as terrible as the Snyderverse so I guess at least WB picked a good time to rethink their DCEU. If they're so determined to beat Marvel at their own game, now's the time to do it.
Most of the Phase 4 I don't even see as that bad, just average or mediocre overall. Once a franchise hits its apex, there is not many places you can go. What does not help matters is Disney putting these shows on a assembly line expecting constant gang busters, and audiences of these shows having overly high expectations expecting the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun. To the point where to these fans or people, something that is just average or just barely/regular good is considered "bad or terrible" in their eyes. This isn't just a Marvel or DC thing. Modern TV and film audiences have gotten spoiled. Don't even get me started on the video game side of things.
 
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