Dark Knight Returns Bat Tank Was A Last-Minute Add To Snyder’s Justice League

According to the film’s visual effects supervisor, the now-famous Batman tank that appears in Zack Snyder’s Justice League was a last-minute addition. The Snyder Cut added a ton of new footage to the original theatrical cut of Justice League, much of which had already been shot by Snyder during the original production, but some of which was created entirely for the director’s cut’s release on HBO Max. The Bat Tank was one such addition.

Even within the scenes shared between both versions of Justice League, the style and tone are drastically different. That’s primarily due to the extensive VFX work done on the Snyder Cut, which did everything from changing Steppenwolf’s armor to altering the film’s color palette to adding in incredible shots like that of the Bat Tank. The result is a four-hour film that most have heralded as far superior to Joss Whedon’s version.

Speaking with TheFilmJunkee on YouTube, John ‘D.J.’ Des Jardin – the visual effects supervisor for Zack Snyder’s Justice League – discussed how the addition of the Bat Tank came to be. The tank was one of many ideas Snyder wanted to incorporate into his director’s cut, but it didn’t end up getting selected until pretty late in the process due to time constraints on the production side. Read Des Jardin’s full quote below.

“There were a lot of requests toward the end to try to get a lot of cool stuff going and that was a request that came in at the eleventh hour, and I honestly didn’t know if we could accommodate it because it was a very complicated shot… I did talk to Zack for a while about, ‘dude, I don’t know, I don’t know if we can get this done in time.’ And then finally Bryan [Hirota] and I talked a little bit internally, and agreed, [Snyder] really wants this, and I personally am not going to hear the end of it unless we just do it, so let’s just do it.”

Something like the addition of the Bat Tank might seem minor at first glance, but it’s the combination of those sorts of little details that made the final version of the Snyder Cut so satisfying for longtime fans. Des Jardin also mentioned that the tank was an homage to Frank Miller’s famous comic The Dark Knight Returns, in which Batman pilots a similar vehicle. Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne pulled heavily from that particular comics storyline, making the tank even more of an appropriate addition.

Though Snyder’s plans for his version of Batman fizzled out when he was ousted from the future of the DCEU, Affleck will return to reprise the role in 2022’s The Flash. That film will also feature the return of Michael Keaton’s Batman for the first time since the 1990s, which is already stirring up a lot of excitement amongst fans. The live-action Dark Knight Returns adaptation some have hoped for may not be happening any time soon, but there’s still a lot of great Batman content on the horizon.