ABSTRACT
On July 19, 2016, some four months after the meteoric debut and decline of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice at the box office, 1 Warner Bros. released an extended “Ultimate Edition.” The new R-rated cut provided audiences with approximately 30 additional minutes to appreciate director Zack Snyder’s cinematic vision, and yet within the next month one could find at least ten other feature-length versions of Batman v Superman on the Internet, many released within just days of each other. Unlike corporate sanctioned alternative cuts destined to find their way onto the third disc of a Blu-ray boxed set, these different versions of Batman v Superman are fan edits made on the personal computers of people with pseudonyms such as slendernyan, PlzDieNow, JobWillins, and MajorPineapple (Figure 12.1). 2 Rather than merely speculating about what else could have been made from the dearth of digital material provided in the extended cut of Batman v Superman, these fan editors used the content of the film itself as their medium for creative and critical expression. Through these fan edits, which variously excised and reorganized scenes from the film, modified the color grading of the visuals, and even recombined elements from Batman v Superman and Man of Steel (2013), members of the audience essentially stood from their proverbial seats in the cinema and resolved to tell their own versions of the story. Following this example, in this chapter, a conscientious look into fan editing will reveal appreciable intersections between fan culture and the broader field of remix: fan edits are generally created by amateurs and are intentionally noncommercial; fan edits are sourced from popular media and have continually increased in technical sophistication; and the public reception of fan edits is regularly impeded by logistical problems and evidence of social inequities.
