As you know by now, Henry Cavill had a mustache for many of his Superman scenes in Justice League due to the extensive reshoots that he was part of. He had grown the mustache for Mission: Impossible – Fallout, which he was shooting at the same time. The mustache was covered up with CGI in Justice League, but many fans were still able to notice and felt that the final result was distracting.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout director Christopher McQuarrie was a guest on Empire’s podcast to talk about the movie, and he went into great detail about the whole Justice League situation.
McQuarrie said that he got a call from Justice League producer Charles Roven, asking if they could shave Henry Cavill’s mustache for their reshoots. McQuarrie was eager to help, but had to talk to his team to make sure the move made sense for everyone.
Someone from the Warner Bros. side had suggested that they would pay to digitally add Cavill’s mustache back into Mission: Impossible. McQuarrie was against the idea because a fake mustache would never look as good as the real thing, and his producer Jake Myers calculated that they would need $3 million from Warner Bros. to add a digital mustache to Cavill.
So the compromise was this — McQuarrie was willing to take the $3 million from Warner Bros. to shut down production on Mission: Impossible until Cavill was able to grow his mustache back after doing the Justice League reshoots. But when that compromise was presented to Paramount Pictures, the studio that was making Mission: Impossible, the idea was thrown out.
You can listen to McQuarrie tell the story in his own words in great detail in the audio player below around the 2:36:16 mark.
The Henry Cavill Justice League mustache situation was unfortunate, but Warner Bros. has no one to blame but themselves in my opinion. They had plenty of footage of Henry Cavill as a clean shaven Superman. For some reason, they elected to reshoot a majority of his scenes while he was shooting another movie where his character had a mustache. Paramount Pictures shouldn’t have had to compromise their movie to help out a competitor who made a bad choice.
Give McQuarrie’s interview a listen and let me know your thoughts in the comments below.
