Zack Snyder has released a Justice League storyboard detailing a scene in which the origins of the Mother Box are revealed. It seems Snyder planned to have the Mother Box found by the Nazis in World War II, then passed on to American scientists.

Controversial director Zack Snyder may have left the DC Extended Universe, but that doesn’t mean he’s stopped caring about it. Over on Vero, Snyder’s favorite social media channel, Snyder has been happily revealing countless insights into his films. He’s explained why Bruce Wayne had abandoned Wayne Manor, and he’s discussed the Knightmare scene in detail.

The latest revelation is a storyboard published for Justice League, a sequence that would have explained the history of the Mother Box. It runs from the aftermath of the Second World War to the present day, detailing Cyborg’s secret origin story.

According to Snyder, then, the Mother Box was found by the Nazis near to the end of the Second World War. It was presumably captured by the Allies, who spent decades researching it - right up until the moment Cyborg’s father used it to heal his son. The storyboard is fascinating.

This scene is certainly not canon. The Mother Box’s backstory is actually detailed in a one-shot released with the Wonder Woman home release. It serves as a sort of epilogue to Wonder Woman, with Etta Candy assembling a crack team to go on a top secret mission. After the bombing in Liege, the “powers-that-be” found something “very old and very powerful.” Candy wound up leading a team to collect the mysterious artifact, and ship it to the Americans. It was revealed to be the Mother Box.

The canon explanation works a little better. The idea that a Nazi scientific team had retrieved a sort of “cosmic cube,” that was sent to the United States and studied by American scientists after the war, sounds a little too similar to the Tesseract in Captain America: The First Avenger and The Avengers. It’s not a particularly satisfying concept, especially given Justice League was always going to be compared to The Avengers.

It’s not clear how far Snyder was in production when he chose to drop this scene. The general idea was retained for the DCEU - that the Mother Box was found after one of the World Wars and shipped to the United States for study - but it was clearly heavily adapted. That does suggest perhaps some of Snyder’s other ideas will yet find their way into the canon.

More: What Was Zack Snyder’s Original 5 Movie DCEU Plan?

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