Though its box office figures didn't quite end up as impressive as the original estimates ($166 million in the States as opposed to $170 million, for a $420 million global take, down from $424 million), Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice is still off to a strong start. To build on that and prime the pump for this summer's home entertainment release, Warner Bros. has released a deleted scene from the film featuring Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor. Take a look below, but be aware of possible spoilers for those who have yet to see the movie.
The scene elaborates on Luthor's capture in the Kryptonian ship after our heroes have defeated Doomsday. As a tactical team moves in, he's seen commuting with.... someone (or something), a horned creature with three floating boxes that vanishes into dust as the troopers arrive. As you know if you've seen the film itself, Luthor makes reference at the end to something making its way to Earth, likely attracted by his creation of Doomsday. And the deleted moment certainly seems to indicate that powerful forces are aware of the planet now. But what are they? Theories have abounded, including that the horned beast is a herald of the villain Darkseid (Kevin Smith is completely confident that it's Steppenwolf), whose symbol and winged servants are seen in the "Knightmare" vision Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) has of a world in ruins and Superman as a villain earlier in the film. But he doesn't seem to directly look like anything to do with Darkseid as seen in the comics. Still, the boxes floating in the air above Eisenberg? Mother Boxes, according to director Zack Snyder, the powerful, almost magical reality shifting supercomputers also briefly glimpsed during the video showing Cyborg's (Ray Fisher) uncomfortable origin.
As for the extended, R-Rated "Ultimate Cut", which is scheduled to hit Blu-ray and DVD in the US on July 16 (and possibly here on the same day, though no official word has arrived), Snyder talked to Collider about that version of the film, which adds back in 30 minutes of footage. “We call it the Ultimate Cut because to me it’s a deeper dive into that world and there are storylines in there that get fleshed out by the longer version,” he says. “I would say that we didn’t really take out much of the Superman/Batman story because I felt like, you know that’s kind of the movie, but there was some sort of interstitial stuff that surrounds the story, that kind of finishes some of the ideas that we trimmed back, and I think that’s what you get.
"There’s a little bit of action, there’s a little bit of violence that we trimmed out for the MPAA that we put back. The Batman warehouse rescue, there’s a couple shots of Doomsday that were too intense. Then there’s a little bit longer ending, sort of the ending sequence, and the opening of the movie, the North Africa sequence is really much different. It was in there until very recently, so all of it’s finished. It was really just a function of time, to be honest. Because the movie’s long now, long-ish – I don’t think it’s long, but when you get over two and a half hours the studio starts getting nervous. I’m not James Cameron who’s like ‘No it’s three hours, suck it!’, which is cool by the way. I just wanted to try and get it to a length that is work-able.”