Zack Snyder’s Sunday Instagram post with Frank Miller was more than a selfie.
Shared as a joint post from both of their verified accounts, the second slide is the one that matters: a video that dissolves Miller’s iconic Dark Knight Returns splash page, the silhouetted Batman leaping against a gray sky, into black-and-white live-action footage of Ben Affleck’s armored Batman from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
You can watch it below.
The Comic Becoming Live Action
The reason the morph works as cleanly as it does is that Snyder built those shots from Miller’s panels in the first place. The armored suit, the grapnel, the framing of the Batman v Superman warehouse fight all came straight off the page of The Dark Knight Returns, so the comic art and the film footage line up nearly frame for frame.
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That is the whole trick of the edit. Because the source material and the movie were always this close, the dissolve doesn’t feel like a cut between two different things. It feels like one image resolving into the other, the drawing sharpening into a photograph.
You can see the transition in the frame below.
To be clear, this is not a sequence pulled from any of Snyder’s films. It is a new edit, cut for this post, and it plays like a proof of concept. Here is what Frank Miller’s page looks like when it becomes live action, and here is the filmmaker who has spent a decade saying he wants to be the one to do it.
Even The Music Is A Signal
Then there is the audio. The post is set to Kronos Quartet performing Philip Glass’s “Mishima/Opening,” and that is not a track from any DC film score.
Glass is a Snyder calling card. His music scored the Doctor Manhattan origin sequence in Watchmen, one of the most celebrated stretches of Snyder’s filmography, and the choice to reach for Glass again here rather than a needle drop or a superhero cue is the kind of detail Snyder never leaves to chance. It frames the whole thing as something more deliberate and more personal than a fan edit.
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The full leap, rendered in the comic’s own black and white, is below.
A Weekend Of Signals
Take the video on its own and it is a striking piece of fan-service. Take it alongside the rest of the weekend and it reads like a campaign.
On stage Saturday night at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre, Snyder was asked when a Dark Knight Returns movie was going to happen and answered “when they let us.” When a fan yelled out for a Justice League sequel, he fired back with a jab at the studio over what has been done with the characters. Then, by Sunday morning, he and Miller jointly published a video of The Dark Knight Returns transforming into Snyder’s Batman, with Miller’s name attached to the post.
That last part is the part that should not be glossed over. This isn’t a fan cutting comic panels against movie footage. This is the director and the author of the source material co-signing the same piece of media, the morning after Snyder pointed at the gate and dared the incoming regime to open it.
As CBN exclusively reported, Snyder is described as gung ho about adapting The Dark Knight Returns and finishing his Justice League arc once the Paramount takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery closes, with the SnyderVerse fully back in play as the De Luca-Abdy era takes shape. The deal itself is currently in court, with twelve state attorneys general suing to block it and Paramount now aiming to close by late September.
So on the same weekend the merger that decides all of this sits in front of a judge, Snyder and Miller all but storyboarded the pitch in public, days before San Diego Comic-Con opens its doors.
Cosmic Book News will be on the ground at San Diego Comic-Con all week, so stay tuned.
Patrick Scanlon writes about pop culture for Cosmic Book News. He has a strong interest in comics, animation, movies, and entertainment, and hopes to one day create his own comic books and animated projects. Outside of writing, Patrick also enjoys computer engineering and coding.