Do we like Zack Snyder?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Decent record, real charity work and no harmful words found, but contested allegations about fan campaigns and a shaky line on toxic fans.
Zack Snyder is the guy behind 300, Watchmen, Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, and for a decade he has been the patron saint of a very devoted fandom. His big arc is Justice League: he left the original production, Joss Whedon took over, and years of fan pressure eventually got his four-hour cut onto HBO Max in 2021.
The Snyder Cut campaign is also where the mess is. In 2022 Rolling Stone reported allegations, drawing mostly on unnamed sources, that Snyder hired an online marketing firm and encouraged fan campaigns against two Warner Bros. executives. He denies any involvement with such firms, and told filmmaker Adam Wingard “I do not control my fans”. Nothing has been proven either way.
On the harm test, the record is clean from what we found. No anti-trans campaigning, no conspiracy rabbit hole, no culture-war grifting in his own words. He has been accused online of being a fascist and a homophobe over his films, and answered that “obviously, I'm not a fascist” and that he is “pro-gay”. He is also developing Deviants, a lesbian action film with Tig Notaro, per Notaro on a podcast. That's a project in development, not a finished film, so we're giving it modest weight.
The recent news is a mixed bag. The Last Photograph premiered at TIFF on 13 September and reportedly sits at 18 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. Snyder's defence was to call 300 “the gayest movie ever made”, which will land differently depending on whether you read it as a fair point about the film's subtext or a deflection. We couldn't find a straight rebuttal of the film's critics.
So: would we support him? Mostly yes. He's passed the harm check and mostly passed the nice check, with an asterisk for the contested fan-campaign allegations and a tendency to defend the loudest of his supporters. It's a good record with one real question mark.