Normally you have to wait for the home video release to see these kinds of things, but not this time: a deleted scene from Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice is now on YouTube. The clip was put online by Warners themselves.
The deleted scene is a spoiler for the film’s plot, so if you’re still planning on seeing it, look away from these next two sentences: Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) is standing in the Kryptonian ship, on his way to creating Doomsday. It’s here he has a hallucination of soldiers breaking into the same ship to find Steppenwolf, who in the comics is the leader of the army on Planet Apokolips — ruled, of course, by Darkseid.
The movie already contains a hint of Darkseid during one of Batman’s “Knightmare” sequences, where Bats is standing on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ruins of Gotham and one of Darkseid’s Omega symbols is glowing in the distance. This deleted scene would have hammered it home.
Darkseid’s suggested involvement in the upcoming Justice League movie should surprise no one. He’s one of the biggest villains in the DC Universe, and Marvel is this close to upstaging him with the competition’s counterpart, Thanos. Warner Bros. most likely wants Darkseid on the big screen sooner rather than later, to stand a fighting chance against the stakes of Infinity War. Hence this movie setting up ten thousand things rather than telling a straight story.
There’s no mystery here — the despot of Apokolips is in our future with or without this scene. The real mystery is why Jesse Eisenberg was cast as Lex Luthor, instead of Granny Goodness.
