Zack Snyder Explains Why He Had “No Interest” in Making Superhero Movies Like Marvel
Zack Snyder was never interested in making his DC superheroes feel like they belonged in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
While Marvel built a blockbuster machine around action, humor, spectacle, and crowd-pleasing momentum, Snyder was chasing something heavier. He wanted gods, mythology, fear, power, and heroes who looked like they could be carved into an ancient monument.
That difference shaped Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Zack Snyder’s Justice League, and Snyder now admits his approach may not have been the easiest way to compete with Marvel.
While promoting his 2026 indie drama The Last Photograph, Snyder reflected on his time making DC movies and explained why Marvel Studios’ enormously successful formula wasn’t something he wanted to imitate.
He said: “[Marvel is] like an amusement park ride, right? The ups, the drops, the kind of cruising part, and then another drop. At the end, you’re like, ‘Wow, that was crazy, that was awesome.’
“I had no interest in that. And you know, maybe that was a mistake. But I don’t think that way. I can’t do that. I’d rather just kind of talk about the mythology of them. And maybe that’s not as fun.”
That philosophy is all over Snyder’s DC work. Man of Steel presents Superman as an almost biblical figure while asking what humanity would actually do if someone with godlike abilities suddenly appeared among us.
Batman v Superman pushes that idea even further, turning Superman’s existence into an argument about power, responsibility, fear, and whether anyone should have that much control over the world.
Even Zack Snyder’s Justice League, with its massive four-hour runtime, plays less like a breezy superhero team-up and more like an epic about fallen gods, resurrection, sacrifice, and an approaching apocalypse.
Marvel has obviously played with mythology as well, sometimes with actual gods. The difference is in the presentation. Snyder wanted Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and the rest of the Justice League to carry a larger-than-life weight. Humor and spectacle were part of his movies, but they weren’t driving the experience.
His admission that “maybe that was a mistake” is interesting considering what was happening at the box office during his DC run. The MCU had turned its interconnected superhero universe into a monster success, and Warner Bros. was trying to establish the DCEU alongside it.
Snyder could have moved closer to Marvel’s crowd-friendly style, but that apparently wasn’t a movie he knew how, or wanted, to make.
This also isn’t a new philosophy Snyder has adopted years after leaving DC. Back in 2014, while he was still working with Warner Bros., the filmmaker talked about superheroes as a form of modern mythology.
He believed these characters could function similarly to old myths, giving audiences stories through which they could examine themselves and the world.
Snyder was also a fan of Marvel’s movies. His point wasn’t that Marvel’s approach was wrong. He simply believed DC had an opportunity to give audiences something different.
Whether that approach worked is still one of the great superhero movie debates. Snyder’s DC films inspired a passionate fanbase while also generating plenty of criticism, and some of his creative decisions will probably be argued over for as long as people are still arguing about Batman and Superman.
Snyder wasn’t attempting to build DC’s version of Marvel. He wanted superheroes to feel like modern gods walking among ordinary people, complete with all the fear, consequences, and philosophical baggage that comes with that idea.
Maybe it wasn’t as fun as the amusement park Marvel ride. For better or worse, though, it was unmistakably Zack Snyder.