As you may know, Bryan Cranston was considered for the Lex Luthor role in BvS. And while yes, he played a bald evil guy before, damn it would have been a sight to see...

Ugh, why does that look so good.

=(

I liked Jesse Eisenberg

I like how the "He flew too close to the sun" line is actually in the movie.

Eisenberg would've made an incredible Riddler or maybe even joker

That's what they were considering him for. He was gonna be Jimmy Olsen.

Bryan Cranston would have made a better lex luthor . why was lex made like a joker in bvs idk. why did snyder think making lex a crazy psychopath would be a great idea.

Cranston was NEVER asked or considered to be Lex. This is a hope that went on the net and social media for too long. Cranton himself has even said he was never asked. Eisenberg is supposed to be closer to the Lex II that was around during the Death of Superman era. The problem is so many people are used to the same old same old bald Lex that they can't even get past it. They can get passed a terrible rendition of Superman that Cavill plays but they can't seem to wrap their heads around the great job that Eisenberg does on Lex :/

I'm late to this party, but I don't care. Just like I don't care about all of the DCEU criticism, as I support everything. That being said, I'm in the definite minority, but I actually enjoyed Jesse's take on Luthor. While everybody was focused on his age and eccentric behavior, I was focused on the part that was actually Luthor: his intelligence, his arrogance, his ruthlessness, his background with being abused by his father (right out of the comics), and most importantly, his nearly obsessive desire to kill Superman; being the only live-action version of the character to do so (even though it was indirect, it was his plan: which worked).

People keep saying that Luthor's plan to go through great lengths to kill Supes was dumb, but as I recall in "Superman: Birthright", Luthor went to great lengths there, too. He used kryptonite and bank-rolled a phony invasion with just as faux aliens; all just to discredit/kill Superman. In the Justice League Unlimited cartoon, Luthor went to great lengths to discredit Superman (with the endgame being to kill him as well) by bank-rolling a non-existent election and a detonator.

People just don't like new ideas I suppose. Don't know why. At one point, “Superman: Earth One” I believe, Lex was a female.

bryan cranston is overrated

Because thats what Lex actually is.

Lex is not like how he is shown in the movie. Not at all imo. Lex is intelligent, deceiving, arrogant, proud, he has a god complex but he is not like joker at all.

He was in his earliest appearances, much like Superman used to be more of a prick. Bold: the BvS version are those things, but his god complex is projected onto Superman and he's obsessed with tearing it down for not being there for him when he was a child.

Isn't he?

@outside_85: Right, But what we saw in the movie was not lex attitude we saw a failed attempt by DC to do a Joker. Im guessing they were hoping it would turn out like The Dark Knight. Using that movies success as an example, bvs should have been dark but it was overly dark. I was fine with the dark tone btw. But lex could have talked less that would have made the movie better. He is a psycho (undeniably yes) but they should have kept it to just mind games and his controlling nature.

Aka, you would have preferred if they had stuck with the modern 'white collar' criminal whose ambitions were psychotic rather than him having all too real scars.

I see the comparisons between Jesse's Lex and Heath's Joker, but I have to say that both versions are outside of the normal perception of the characters, both were changed to match the world they were put into rather than slavishly obedience to the source material. For the Joker this works well because there are so many versions of him that there is an in-comic explanation provided for it (the roulette personality), Lex has only changed gradually over the years, and it's been so slow that most readers haven't noticed the changes.

Jesse's Lex is pretty close to what I imagine is a bipolar-disorder that most people in the movie just haven't noticed. When he gets what he wants, he's Nice Lex and while be may be a bit of a prick, he's nervous in crowds, not terribly well spoken or very confident by the looks of things (a leftover I imagine his father beat into him). When things go wrong or people upset him, Gollum comes out and you better hope he doesn't kill you for it (which I suspect we are to lean later on is also why Sr. is not around any more). Thing is that we weren't confronted with a Smeagol/ Gollum back and forth, or a Dafoe mirror scene, this Lex changes as well, just without the camera moving. I think this particular change was done partly to explain why Lex goes out of his way, spends millions of dollars and kills dozens of people just to get Superman... which in a movie like this I just dont see any of the comic reasons working. (In one origins it's the loosing of his hair, in another it's because they were both from Smallville, in STAS its simply because Superman cant be bought and he wrecked an expensive robot suit.)

@outside_85: True but Heath was only out of his "common perception joker " character because he improvised. I just did not see that in Eisenberg Lex. In the end this worked out against them i read the critics reviews some of them even said that the Lex sucks so bad that in the middle of the movie you wish Batman and Superman teamed up to kill him. In the final scene for lex when he is saying "ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding" over and over again , that was disturbing and unnecessary, for that long god no. I believe this was one of the reasons why this movie did not live up to its hype.

@vegetassgss: All acting is improvisation on some level since no director alive today is Stanley Kubric. As far as critics go, I don't put much of anything into their reviews of BvS since to me it appears they watched some other movie or Snyder showed up midway through the screening and kicked them. That last scene with Lex... well the alternative was Darkseid or Steppenwolf showing up halfway through the credits doing something completely irrelevant.

Reason, I think, that BvS failed is that the expectations of what it should have been was too different to what it actually was, which is something that baffles me. I mean, most people who's seen BvS had also been in to see Man of Steel, and because of that, all those people should have been prepared somewhere for what BvS was likely to be since nothing major had changed in the approach since then. But since everyone has now been on a near-decade long diet of Marvel movies and the similar Fox X-Men, I think there are alot of critics and movier goers who has come to expect their kind of movie being what a superhero movie should be, and it just upsets them when it's not. And this is what I have noticed in those reviews; Where the fun? The jokes? The smiles? The feel good vibe? Those are complaints I've seen repeated for BvS... and I kinda find that a bit annoying that there doesn't seem to be room in the world of movies for entries that dont follow a certain formula. But then again, maybe Snyders movies are just ahead of their time... I mean there was a time when Westerns were like Marvel movies; simple, lighthearted, lots of bright and vibrant colors... in that age of John Wayne, a movie like Eastwood's spagetti westerns would likely have been as ill recieved as BvS is among superhero movies. Same is true of comics, they were much different back in the day, where the Joker could make boner jokers... now he just cuts his own face off. So who knows, 10-20 years down the line BvS-style superhero movies might be the norm. (Or maybe not)

@outside_85: The movie was supposed to attract more people simply because it had Batman in it. Some of my friends who do not even like Superman went to see Batman. The box office collection was less than expected. Yes the reviews were criticizing for - a darker tone, no jokes, no marvel formula.

I kinda find that a bit annoying that there doesn't seem to be room in the world of movies for entries that dont follow a certain formula.

Maybe the world is just not ready for these kinda movies as you say. Iron man 3, Deadpool and well even GotG will bring in more money than bvs and had better reviews if not. To be honest i am not against marvel or their new formula for printing money i am shocked that in this world batman, superman are not getting enough praise. I honestly thought Batman and Superman fighting would be a game changer for DCEU too bad it was not. Let us hope the Justice League is a hit, DC is trying so hard to get established on screen and i want them to.

I imagine that at some point, unless Disney takes away all control of the movies from Marvel for w/e reason, it will get darker... because the people making the movies will eventually get tired of putting on the same show movie after movie. Like when RDJ retires from Iron Man and the new guy takes over... does anyone expect him to pretend to be RDJ? Do we expect the MCU to last beyond the careers of the current actors?

And in IM3's case it's completely underseved... aka: I really don't like that movie, it doesn't deserve the amount of money or the praise it gets. The other two are inoffensive comedies, though I can critizes Guardians for how stupid and cliche it is from time to time. It's fun, yes definitely, but it doesn't hold up well to repeated viewings.

Well, thats kinda my problem with the reviews, they are generally slamming BvS for not being something its never pretended to be. But in a way it has changed the game, but in the negative fashion with more interference from the parent studio. So if anything, we will now get the JL movie we deserve for not supporting BvS enough... whenever you think that as a good thing or not I leave to you.

Anyways, back to Lex; There might also be a nod of nostalgia built into his performance, since all the previous big screen Lex's have had strange quirky personalities where they dance around on screen much like Nicolson's Joker did. So perhaps the public quirky Lex we have here is a sort of nod to that, and then when he gets nasty he turns into the more ruthless man we are more used to. And who knows, if he appears in JL, he might have calmed down a bit and he's turned into the guy we know. Or you know, he could have a monkey:

BvS Lex was absolute trash and the worst thing about that entire movie.

@outside_85: It is hard to say, i think Disney/ Marvel have already established their dominance on the superhero genre. RDJ will retire some time lets hope it puts IM to rest in movies. I really dont like that character or the actor, I also think IM3 was horrible. We can only hope that JL movie and the new DCEU even fares average in terms of box office.

"This is not Kryptonite."

Corey Stoll was much more convincing Lex Luthor in Ant Man than Eisenburg in Batman v Superman ever did.

Eisenberg was scarier in the Social Network than he was in BvS. In it he was a cold, calculating,billionaire genius you could fear, in BvS the only scary part was his overacting.

Agree.

If anybody liked that vid you should check out Solyentbrak1's other vids. He makes the best fanmade trailers I'd say.

It's still my hope that Lex Jr. is killed off and they bring in Cranston as Lex Sr.

@outside_85: What is that panel from?

Beata

I know I'm late, but you're full of ****. People don't bash BvS because it wasn't like Marvel, people hate it because it was a crappy movie. The tone was the least of its concerns. The editing and plot were garbage, the characterization was iffy, with Lex being a mixture of Joker and freaking Riddler, and motivations weren't entirely clear. Say what you want about Marvel, but at least they know how to make decent, coherent movies. This movie, IMO, was even WORSE than Man of Steel, which I actually liked. Zack Snyder didn't help either, hyping the movie to ridiculous levels by calling Marvel flavor of the week and using buzzwords such as "transcendent." What the hell does that even mean?

Also, I call BS on this movie being ahead of its time. It's a garbage movie, period.

Yep, this. Even if it's not Cranston and it turns out to be nothing more than an internet rumour, it would still be way better if he was an older, psychotic man rather than this clownish youngster. The fan made trailer in the first post is exactly the type of thing they should have been going for - an older man with lines of experience on his face where you just know he's suffering inside and has the genius and psychosis to kill.

All-Star Superman.

I'm full of s***, and you are a vomit milkshake with a sweetcorn on top. Now do you have anything of actual relevance to add here? Because starting off like that says 'no' to me.

He could have topped Kevin Spacey's performance as Lex with a good script.

I'd say my post was pretty relevant, but I guess you didn't read it. Oh well. Guess I was a bit too aggressive there. I apologize.

Even though I really liked Eisenberg Lex, there's no doubt about it that Cranston would have been badass af

lol no

Eisenberg was a great villain IMO but a horrible Lex.