WarnerMedia Did Start an Investigation Last Month on the ‘Justice League’ Production Following Ray Fisher’s Tweets
After Ray Fisher, who played Cyborg on 2017’s Justice League, tweeted last month about Joss Whedon, Jon Berg, and Geoff Johns being unprofessional on set, WarnerMedia started an indoor investigation to try to get to the heart of it.
Deadline, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter have all confirmed that this investigation was launched last month, but so far hasn’t found anything. It is not limited to these three executives, and the company is not pre-judging any of them. It will also not be conducted in the public sphere, and no timeline has been revealed about it.
Fisher tweeted yesterday about this before the news broke, saying that a third-party investigation had been launched recently (tweet below). Deadline understands this as a reference to the ongoing investigation that they are reporting, which they point out started last month, and not recently as Fisher said. Variety has a different take on this, as they understand that the company hired an independent third party to investigate the matter, in addition to their own inquiry.
I believe this investigation will show that Geoff Johns, Joss Whedon, Jon Berg (and others) grossly abused their power during the uncertainty of AT&T’s merger with Time Warner.
Thank you @WarnerMedia and @ATT for making strides to ensure a safer workplace for all!🙏🏽
A>E
(2/2)
— Ray Fisher (@ray8fisher) August 20, 2020
Over the past few weeks, Ray Fisher has been posting several tweets trying to raise awareness of what happened on that set after Zack Snyder departed and Joss Whedon came in to direct the extended reshoots. Here are some of them:
Joss Wheadon’s on-set treatment of the cast and crew of Justice League was gross, abusive, unprofessional, and completely unacceptable.
He was enabled, in many ways, by Geoff Johns and Jon Berg.
Accountability>Entertainment
— Ray Fisher (@ray8fisher) July 1, 2020
During the LA reshoots for Justice League, Geoff Johns summoned me to his office to belittle and admonish my (and my agent’s) attempts to take grievances up the proper chain of command.
He then made a thinly veiled threat to my career.
This behavior cannot continue.
A>E
— Ray Fisher (@ray8fisher) August 12, 2020
Whether or not you believe something did happen on that set and that Ray Fisher is right for bringing this up, or that he is just tweeting this out to stay in the public eye for a little longer while he doesn’t get any calls from casting agents, I think this is significant news, even if WarnerMedia doesn’t find anything and they judge that everything was conducted as normal as one would have expected on a highly stressful situation like that.
While I don’t like to get into gossiping or anything like that, I do want to say that I believe something did happen on the Justice League set, both during Snyder’s time and especially Whedon’s reshoots. First of all, Snyder started shooting the movie right after Batman v Superman premiered to very negative reactions, and WB almost went in a completely opposite direction. However, they decided to give him another chance because they had invested a lot of money already into preproduction for the movie he had envisioned.
After that, he was shooting for eight months, which is much more time than what a movie like that would take to film. For example, Avengers: Infinity War and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker filmed for around six months, while Avengers: Endgame took roughly five months to shoot. After that, WB wanted massive reshoots on the film which were planned to be done by Snyder, but then he departed the project. There is even some speculation that he was fired and they covered it saying it was Snyder’s decision, but there is no substantial evidence of that.
Then, Whedon stepped in and practically reshot the entire film in three months over the summer of 2017 (we’ll get the full extent of who shot what from the theatrical version of the movie when we get the Snyder Cut of Justice League next year, which will feature only what Zack filmed). He also had to get post-production done in time to meet their November 17 release date because some executives at the studio wanted to get their bonuses.
Just thinking about it gives me a headache, so I don’t think it’s the weirdest thing in the world that Whedon and some other executives were a bit stressed out. Those are some of the facts that we know. I don’t want to judge anybody I don’t personally know unless there is enough evidence against him/her, but I also think that where there is smoke, there is usually fire, and there has been a lot of smoke over at Justice League‘s and Whedon’s camps, and we are not in a time where we should not pay attention to people raising awareness of situations they found unprofessional at the very minimum.
Also, in a place like Hollywood, where people’s earnings are counted in the tens of millions sometimes, there are quite a few reasons for some of the rest of the cast and crew not to speak up if something did indeed happen, and sometimes it takes someone who has nothing to lose to do so. Whether tweeting about it was the right way to complain or not is something worthy of another discussion. I do think, however, that there is a very good chance that this investigation finds no evidence of any unprofessional behavior, and that Fisher’s tweets are forgotten in three months, especially in the Twitter-sphere, which has been built on the concept of Trending Topics.
I do want to point out, however, that it is very strange that a director would insist so much on having a scene where Ezra Miller’s Flash falls onto Wonder Woman for a very quick and dated joke, and so much so that even though Gal Gadot did not want to film that, Whedon went on to place a body double in there just so that they could have that scene that added absolutely nothing to the story or the plot. That is just gross.
Not all Justice League news are this hard to digest as of late, as tomorrow we will have our first official trailer for Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which will premiere on HBO Max in the first half of 2021.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
