We are, more or less, done with superhero movies for 2015. Summer blockbuster season has given way to thoughtful prestige drama and horror movie season, with the tights-and-flights set on hiatus until 2016. However, once the new year does roll around, we will be back in superhero-land very quickly, with Deadpool in February and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice set to liven up theaters in March. So we're due for a reminder: There is a movie coming out in which Batman and Superman will fight each other, for reasons. Even though that's five months away, the folks behind the movie want you thinking about it, like, now.
Hence this phony Fortune magazine article on Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor, the purported villain of Batman v Superman. It is the first bit of viral marketing for the film; a fawning profile of the movie's 31-year-old wunderkind strewn with little Easter eggs referencing the wider DC Universe. Some of them are kind of strange!
Like the biggest, most obvious one: Eisenberg is actually playing Alexander Luthor Junior, who inherited the company from his deceased father. To the untrained eye, this is merely an explanation for the yuppie sensibilities on display in Eisenberg's Converse-and-cardigan take on Luthor, but it is also, conceivably, a reference to the comic-book storyline in which Lex Luthor is dying of kryptonite poisoning and clones himself a new, younger body with a rich mane of red hair which he then transplants his brain into after faking his own death. (I promise I didn't make any of that up.)
And that's only one thing the name "Alexander Luthor, Jr." could be referencing. I won't even mention the alternate universe stuff. There's only a slim chance it'll be relevant to the actual movie in question, partly because it's needlessly complicated comic book lore, and partly because stuff like this is really just meant to get fans speculating in the first place. It really doesn't matter if Eisenberg is playing Lex Luthor Jr. or Sr.; it just matters that he hates Superman.
The profile reveals that Luthor is working on "a product that will protect you, and everyone, from threats you don't even know about yet," which sounds a lot like Tony Stark's idea for Ultron in the most recent Avengers film. It is, more likely, a nod to Brainiac, a Superman villain who might seem like Ultron but is very different in the comics because he is only kind of a robot, and also from outer space. And I hope you're a big fan of comic book industrialists, because there are three massive companies mentioned in this article—Lexcorp (which has ads all over it, but they only link to this Lex Luthor Twitter profile), Wayne Enterprises (which, unlike Lexcorp, does not work with the military) and Kord Industries (which is actually a pretty cool nod to this thing we learned about a few days back.)
None of this changes the fact that this article makes this newest version of Lex sound truly insufferable; he's a guy who "verbally extemporizes computer code like Miles Davis improvising a trumpet solo."
So yeah, maybe casting the guy who played a casually evil version of Mark Zuckerberg was a good call after all.
Related:
Watch Out: Batman v Superman Is Gonna Be 'Sensual'
News from Comic-Con: Batman Is Now Only Marginally Cooler than Superman