The New "Superman v. Batman" trailer exists, so here goes

Circa 2002, before Superman Returns, WB really, really wanted to do a Superman vs. Batman movie, and it even got a reference in a billboard in the background of I Am Legend.  This was just after the success of Spider-Man and X-Men, and WB was trying to figure out to jumpstart the DC heroes, something they'd sort of ignored in the wake of the slow death of the Batman franchise under Joel Schumacher.

As I recall, the storyline for the script was that Batman had been around for a while, gotten married, semi-retired, etc... but then along comes Superman who has a super-fight, and in the battle, somehow Bruce's wife is killed as a bystander.  In this version, in order to keep up with Superman, Batman makes a deal with Satan or something and gets magical powers in order to stay toe-to-toe with Superman until, of course, they had someone else to go fight.

Never make a deal with this guy

A script leaked a couple of years ago has a different version, but, again, Bruce loses a spouse but Superman just says "hey, don't kill nobody, okay?" which Batman totally wants to do.  It involves Joker clones and a lot of painting oneself into a corner, narratively

If you're keeping score, even WB - the people who brought us Catwoman, Jonah Hex and Green Lantern - decided against the green light on this script, maybe deciding we first needed to remind America what Superman looked like.

Well, when Man of Steel did pretty well, but word of mouth wasn't all that great and it wasn't clear WB could just roll out a Superman sequel and expect success, they finally went ahead and pulled the trigger on the Batman/ Superman meet-up, and - if nothing else - they hopefully finally got it out of their system and came up with a product that will give everyone the same entirely unsatisfactory match-up that's occurred in every superhero comic, ever, where neither wins and they become friends so they can go off and fight the other threat that was a bigger deal than their little misunderstanding.

Here's the new trailer, by the way.




I dunno.  Nothing about the new DC cinematic universe does much for me, so I'm just a terrible person to ask, and of course I've already received texts from multiple people asking me what I thought.

I think it looks like the same demographically targeted version of Superman we saw in the last installment with a similarly conceived Batman and Wonder Woman thrown in.  The complete cluster@#$% of an ending of the last movie has clearly driven the internal discussion at WB, and now the terrible ending of the movie I'd rather just forget about is the centerpiece of this movie (keep in mind, Zack Snyder and WB seemed taken by surprise at the press reaction to the last movie and the tremendous body count) as it seems that Superman has accidentally killed Bruce's family during that brawl with Zod.

My assumption is that someone at WB dusted off one of those script drafts from 2002 where Superman himself was responsible for Bruce's wife's death and said "hey, remember this?  Let's just do this.  I don't care if it doesn't make sense.  We're doing this."  It may be short any deals with the devil for magical powers, but that newspaper and Bruce freaking out about the fall of Wayne Tower seem like clues that's what we're getting. (blogger's note: this gets challenged in the comments below, and is worth reading a different interpretation of these shots) 

Frankly, it's a little disappointing.  Batman shouldn't need a personal stake to look into Superman, and if the newspaper is a plant from Lex Luthor, Batman also shouldn't be the kind of character who let's that get the best of him.   It works for a largee-scale movie audience because it's a cheap emotional shortcut to get Batman invested, and in a very direct way, but...  none of it feels like Batman.

Speaking of characters who are a bit off...  I'd initially defended the Kevin Costner scenes in the trailers for Man of Steel where he asks Clark to hide his powers, etc...  but that turned out to be a major let down in the movie itself.  This is the first version of Superman I've seen - and I've seen A LOT of versions of Superman - where his parents are, at best, ambivalent about him using his powers for good and basically act like modern parents of young adults, as Martha tells Clark it's cool if he wants to just move home and play video games instead of saving people.  "You don't owe this world a thing.  You never did."  Inspiring words, Ma Kent.

@#$%.  It's Superman for the age of the helicopter-parent.

I'm not sure if what bothers me more is that this is what's in the movie trailer, or that this idea appeals to the movie-going public.  There's an idea of "super" out there, but, man, even after how many of these Marvel and DC movies over the years, we're still really, really struggling with the idea that these are movies about "heroes".  The story of a superhero does not have to be just juvenile power fantasy wish fulfillment, certainly not with Superman.  And I see not one thing in this trailer that suggests they've really grasped that problem and how Superman can answer that question.

Lastly, it looks like they used the 3rd act of Superman: Birthright as some inspiration, so we'll have to see how that plays out.  I recommend buying and reading a copy, because it's pretty good and has a phenomenal take on Lois Lane.

I'll go ahead and say the following:  I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about Superman, in particular, and less so Wonder Woman and Batman.  I've read not just their comics, but supporting material, histories of the characters, DC Comics histories, etc...  Whether any of it has been worth it or not I will only find out when I go to claim my final reward.

But, all of this just makes me feel tired.  This is what DC Entertainment wants Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman to be, and, I suspect, this will do very, very well at the theater thanks to the sheer novelty of seeing these iconic characters together to the non-comic-reading movie-going public.  And people will like it, and that'll be a thing.  The likelihood that this movie will surprise and delight me has always been exceedingly low.  The work the movie would have to do to be very different from the last installment while also being much better than what I think I'm seeing in the trailer is just as unlikely, but stranger things have happened.

We get the movies we want and what we deserve, and it is a mass medium.  No one is making a Superman movie just for me.  Nor a Batman nor a Wonder Woman movie.  This is the sort of thing that is going to do great, but it's just not my bag, and so I'm handing it all over to the kids.  It's their turn.

Right now, I'm not planning to see this movie in the theater (and, for the love of Mike, please do not say anything as goofy as "but you have to!").  I just don't want to deal with the cognitive dissonance and disappointment.  I'll wait the three months til it shows up on Netflix or 5 til it shows up on HBO.