Zack Snyder’s Justice League has premiered on HBO Max and to the relief of fans, it’s getting much better reviews than Joss Whedon’s Justice League. The Snyder Cut, as it’s called, is now at 78% Certified Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes from 148 reviews and is the third or fourth highest rated DCEU movie (the number is fluctuating and running close with Birds of Prey). That’s about as good a rating as fans could have hoped for after 2017’s Justice League received a 57% rotten rating. It’s also the first DCEU Snyder film to receive a positive reception after Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, attributed by fans to critics failing to see Snyder’s long-term game plan.

While critics are still not fully on board with Snyder’s vision, they all seem to universally appreciate the audacity, vision and sheer ambition and scale of Snyder’s cut of Justice League. It’s essentially the same story, only longer, with a lot more depth and room to let the characters play out their parts and for the action sequences to breathe. The highest praise came from Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com who lauded the movie for being to superhero cinema what Scorcese’s films were to Hollywood in general: comic book art.

Fans on their part are simply loving Zack Snyder’s Justice League. It’s currently rated at 8.9 on popular movie aggregator website IMDb with a 97% audience approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. We’ll never know for sure how many of these are fans who genuinely loved the movie as opposed to those who feel obligated to give it a high rating after participating in a multi-year long campaign to get the Snyder Cut to be greenlit. But judging by critic consensus, it sounds like the movie is genuinely winning fans alike (seeing as critics would have no impetus to favorably receive the Snyder Cut).

I’m eager to get my hands on the movie and intend to watch it some time tomorrow. Hopefully, I’ll be able to post a review over the weekend but judging by some of the early reactions, I’m going to have to succumb to quite a bit of pondering and contemplation before my review comes out.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is now available for streaming on HBO Max.