Justice League actor says reshoots included readjusting tone of Cyborg

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

After it was reported that the JUSTICE LEAGUE reshoots had been underway for much longer than anticipated, and were costing a staggering $25 million, the speculation train began chugging as to why such a simple process became such an endeavor. Though the odds of them adding a GAME OF THRONES-esque dragon battle is out of the cards, we now know at least one aspect of the reshoots involved tinkering with the tone of one major character.

During an interview with IGN actor Joe Morton, who plays Dr. Silas Stone in LEAGUE, he said that though his reshoots only involved small bits and pieces, he believes one of the goals of the reshoots was to “readjust” the tone of Cyborg, the human/robot hero played by Ray Fisher:

Well, the stuff that I had to do were just really small little bits and pieces, nothing necessarily having to do with tone. I know that with Ray [Fisher], the young man who plays Victor, there were some adjustments that they made in terms of the tone of that character. I think what I heard was that there was a need from the studio to lighten up the film in a way, that the film felt too dark. I don't know what that meant in terms of how it actually got translated in terms of the reshoots but that's what I heard. That's what I thought some of the reshoots were about.

We haven’t seen much of Fisher’s character in the trailers or TV spots, with much of the focus being placed on the other heroes – Batman (Ben Affleck), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) and The Flash (Ezra Miller). Of course, there is no way of knowing for sure, but perhaps the studio used the reshoots as a way of making the character more personal, maybe injecting some lighter, funnier moments between him and the other team members. Making less serious films (akin to MAN OF STEEL and BATMAN V. SUPERMAN) appears to be a goal at DC, with WONDER WOMAN having a much more buoyant tone and SHAZAM! aiming to be the most "lighthearted" movie in the DCEU.

Reshoots are commonly used to make changes to the film based on early test screenings, but LEAGUE’s seems to go a bit beyond the norm given the massive cost and extended duration of the process. With that in mind, I say that adding some more depth, and probably levity, to Cyborg is well within the realm of possibility given the magnitude of the reshoots. This is a big movie with a lot of characters, and it’s easy to lose them all in the shuffle, especially when one of the heroes isn't as notable as the others. But the mechanized hero has a chance to break out here, and a way of doing that is to throw in a few jokes to go along with the ray guns and jet packs. Maybe a few "appendage" jokes thrown in, if you catch my drift. 

JUSTICE LEAGUE arrives November 17.