Yesterday something amazing happened. The movie Justice League was released on HBO Max. Now I know that doesn’t sound amazing by itself, but you have to understand the history of this movie. Back in 2017, Zack Snyder was working on his third DC movie named Justice League. He had already released Man of Steel in 2013, which is an origin story for Superman, and followed that up in 2016 with Batman v Superman, which…well, the title kind of says it all.
Zack Snyder was working on Justice League when personal tragedy hit his family. His 20-year-old daughter, Autumn, committed suicide. Zack stopped working on his movie and spent time with his family grieving this horrible loss. Warner Bros. however, decided that they didn’t want to wait for Zack to come back and they hired a new director to finish his film. They brought in Joss Whedon.
The resulting film, Justice League, which was released in theaters in November 2017, was, to put it mildly, a dumpster fire. It was bad… like really bad. As soon as this movie was released, something started to happen. A call throughout the internet from hundreds of people to release the Snyder Cut of Justice League. What this means is that they wanted to see the movie that Zack Snyder had in mind, instead of this Frankenstein’s monster version of two very different directors and tones that they got.
This movement grew and adopted the name RTSC (Release the Snyder Cut) and they pressured WB and AT&T, who recently bought WB, to do just that. Through groundwork, online education, billboards at comic cons, banner flyovers at WB headquarters, and much, much more, four years later the Snyder Cut of Justice League is being released on HBO Max (who is also owned by AT&T). Their efforts worked!
But that’s not what this devotional is really about. Recently, Adam gave me a book called “Release the Snyder Cut: An Insider Look at the Lost Justice League Movie” by Sean O’Connell. It details all of the efforts that this group did throughout the past four years to make this second release (and some would say true release) of Justice League possible… but the thing that was truly amazing about the RTSC movement is that they weren’t singularly focused on the movie’s release.
Almost from the very beginning of the movement, they not only rallied around getting Snyder’s cut released, but also about bringing awareness to and raising funds for suicide prevention. In fact, as of this past February, the RTSC movement has raised over half a million dollars for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). This became a cause for them.
This was the most inspirational thing throughout the entire book. Every event that RTSC had, every time they wanted to do something public, every time they did a fundraiser of some kind, 50% or more of their funds went to AFSP. They took their energy and frustration around the loss of something they wanted, something they were looking forward to… and redirected and focused that energy to better the world.
Throughout this past year, (it was exactly a year ago this past Monday that we closed the church), we have all lost quite a bit. But the RTSC family has inspired me to try to take that frustration, that anger, that untapped energy, and to focus it and direct it towards making the world better.
We have lost a lot, and we need to grieve those losses. Part of that grieving process for me has now become making sure that others have the resources that they need to prevent or lessen their future grief. May we all harness our potential energy and focus it towards building God’s kingdom, even in the midst of grief and sorrow because that is when we need God’s kingdom the most. Amen.
Pastor TC
