Justice League has had a bit of a troubled production. The movie was originally going to be split into two parts, both filmed back to back, Zack Snyder had to step away from the project during post-production after his daughter tragically committed suicide, and reshoots are reportedly pretty extensive, costing Warner Bros. up to $25 million.
Director of The Avengers, Joss Whedon, has stepped in to finish post-production and reshoots, tweaking things like dialogue and making the movie's narrative flow better. It appears that his changes aren't as small as just dialogue, though. Rumors suggest that the entire ending has changed.
Reputable source Peter Sciretta from SlashFilm has reported via his podcast that Justice League will end like a normal movie and won't end on a massive cliffhanger. The villain of Justice League is Steppenwolf, the uncle of major DC Comics baddie Darkseid, the movie was originally supposed to end on a cliffhanger that shows Darkseid coming to Earth to reign hell.
“The original ending of the movie from what I understand was that he was kind of playing the Silver Surfer role and Darkseid playing kind of the Galactus role, and the ending of the movie was a cliffhanger and Justice League 2 was going to be Justice League vs. Darkseid. Darkest arrives at Earth. It was kind of like this down, dirty ending and from what I understand that has been completely removed. The ending ends the movie like a movie and it doesn’t leave a cliffhanger now. They did a reshoot with Robin Wright from Wonder Woman and that’s gonna be a flashback explaining who Steppenwolf is and he’s now the big bad of this movie whereas Darkseid was this looming threat who won’t come.”
Since Justice League 2 isn't on the slate of upcoming DC projects and the studio seems to be trying to rework their original vision for the DCEU, it's not surprising that this was changed. The original ending was to set up the sequel that would've come in 2019 but now that isn't happening so they have decided it is smarter to end it like one complete story.
Ben Affleck previously described Justice League as the "product of two directors" when talking about the unique situation regarding the production. It's unclear if he means that in a good way or a bad way but we'll find out when the movie hits theaters on November 17th, 2017.
