How Zack Snyder Really Feels About Barbie's Snyder Cut Joke

Few movies have had the legendary internet cache that "Zack Snyder's Justice League" had for the four years following the release of the film's 2017 theatrical cut. Of course, fans of the DCEU are well aware of how the whole debacle came together and how it eventually led to a completely recut movie, and in fact, this notion became the subject of a joke in the year's biggest movie, Greta Gerwig's "Barbie." In the film's third act, when the Barbies are waking up from the overwhelming masculine influence of the Kens, one of them recalls that, for some reason, they couldn't stop thinking about the Snyder Cut of "Justice League."

As for how Snyder himself feels about the joke, he seems to have taken it all in good stride. "I thought [Barbie] was great," the filmmaker told Men's Health. "I think the joke is pretty good," he went on, suggesting that the quip is more about his legions of dedicated fans than it is about him specifically. "A hundred percent." While the joke already name-checks Snyder, it could easily come across in this case as a bit more personal.

Warner Bros. is the studio behind "Barbie," and it's also the studio that Zack Snyder butted heads with over many elements of his DC Extended Universe, a clash that helped inevitably lead to the reboot of the DC film franchise under the leadership of filmmaker James Gunn. That's why the "Snyder Cut" joke could be seen as a poke at Snyder himself.

But Snyder mentioned that Warner Bros. CEO Michael DeLuca did warn them about the jab in advance. "They gave us a heads-up," he explained, adding that DeLuca mentioned it to his spouse and producing partner, Deborah Snyder. "'Hey, there's a reference to 'Justice League' in the movie," Zack recalled DeLuca saying. "'It's cool and whatever. I hope you guys understand, we think it's awesome.'"

Considering Zack's response to the "Barbie" movie, it seems that he didn't take the joke to heart. On the contrary, he appears to be blown away by how well-known he is in pop culture for this one thing. "The thing that you need to take a second and think about is that your name is so seamlessly sewed together with a pop-culture phenomenon so big it can exist as a joke in a movie about Barbie. That's pretty insane," he remarked, adding, "You just need to step back for a second and go like, 'Whoa, what did we do? What happened? How is that a thing?'"