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A breakdown and analysis of the Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice Trailer 2.
Answers, insights, and commentary on:
- Viewing this as a villain trailer
- Unpacking Superman and Batman’s views
- The merits and faults of each hero’s position
- Lex Luthor’s performance
- Deferring to military expertise on the battlefield
- Defending Doomsday
- Setting expectations
- Analyzing the sneak peek
…and more.
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – Trailer 2 | 3.4 GB warning!
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – Official Trailer 2 | WB Pictures
Batman v Superman – Exclusive Sneak | WB Pictures
Batman v Superman Trailer Introduced by Ben Affleck | GMA
Blitz Spirit: Britons Who Refused Shelter | BBC History
Turns Out Spoilers Are Good For You | NPR
Pluto, Pixels, & The Psychology of Spoilers | Verge ESP
DC Graphic Novel and DCU MFV Uber Collection | Warner Home
Teen Titans Go! – Two Parter: Part Two | Amazon Video
Web: ManOfSteelAnswers.com
Twitter: @mosanswers
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Software Generated Transcript
I hate how a lot of people are saying this is full of spoilers. Seriously did anyone think that Bats and Supes would still be fighting at the end? And Doomsday was hinted at in the last trailer, it’s just now we have a face to him. Plus the Wonder Woman intro just raises more questions about her appearances chronologically in the other trailers.
Love your episodes, looking forward to listening to this.
Thanks for listening. We’ve seen 7 minutes or less (even the fundraising meeting had an alternate angle in the GMA cut, so who knows if all of this footage makes it into the final film). There are still plenty of surprises left and the film is more than the sum of its surprises or its plot.
I’m with Quad — the trailer didn’t spoil as much as people seemed to think. (And anyway, I don’t think spoilers are as detrimental in marketing as others do, except maybe in the case of mysteries or movies where a twist is the key to the whole thing, which I don’t think BvS is.)
I also think the audience with this one was the general public, not the superfans. They released it on Jimmy Kimmel and on Good Morning America, not Comic-Con.
Looking forward to the episode.
I think the fact that the GMA cut hit on all the same big points as the trailer- First meeting, Lex, Doomsday, Wonder Woman, and banter- reinforces the point that this is what they wanted to communicate to the general audience. A lot of the fan-edits / fan-cuts remove one or more of those things on the premise it makes the trailer better… but then robs the trailer of its intended purpose.
Agreed on the intended audience groups of this newest trailer. I’m part of a certain Movie Fans FB group, and a guy posted that once he showed this video around, all sorts of people around him (his boss and coworkers, his S.O., even his elderly granddad whose previous exposure to mainstream DC had been TDK and JLU) who were otherwise not following the DC news update as closely as you “bigger fans” were all much more interested in seeing this movie (“Is it March yet?”). If this is indictive of casual-ish fans elsewhere, then it really did its job.
Long time listener (and lurker), first time commenter —
Loved what I’ve listened to your podcast so far, Dr. Awkward, you’re the best one-man show I’ve ever stumbled upon. One small thing before I start listening to this latest episode on my smartphone, though: 3.4 GB?! Is that the only available offical .mov file out there? Would it be too much if I’d asked if there could be a more “managable” size of the trailer for us listeners to download, like the SDCC trailer who’s ~only~ a couple hundred megabytes?
Thanks for listening, sorry for replying so late.
Unless you have an application that allows you to download the YouTube stream, there’s no official smaller download.
While the high bitrate SDCC trailer was vastly superior to the YouTube stream, it isn’t the same quality as the Teaser or this Trailer 2. I wish it was released in the same quality, though I wouldn’t want it on my phone!
Hope you’ve found an alternative by now.
Thanks for responding, Doctor!
Since then I found this site: http://www.movie-list.com/trailers/batmanvsuperman And it has (seemingly) legal and above board links to different resolutions of the trailers. Looks like the 3.4 GB version (same link as the one in your show notes) you provided us is the “granddaddy” version that no doubt is even clearer than Blu-Ray, while the 1080p version which would suit my electronic devices much better is the same size range of the SDCC trailer that you gave us. 🙂
(If your comment policy includes “No Links”, then I’m sorry in advance.)
That’s an awesome site, thanks for the heads up. Definitely better than having a huge version on my mobile but better than a YT version. Nice!
This trailer was no different than other “main” trailers for blockbusters. This was a GENERAL AUDIENCE trailer. Look how much the trailers for Avengers and Jurassic World spoiled and it didn’t stop them from being gigantic hits.
Excellent analysis.
Thanks for listening Rene!
Reception to the trailer has been divided, but in the long run I think it will help the film’s reception.
Also, you should consider uploading these episodes onto YT as well.
I would but I can’t afford the time, attention, notices to moderate.
I don’t delete detracting comments because of their positions but because they result in flame wars which cause my phone to flip out. I could mute the notifications but then I couldn’t moderate.
I know people like YT as a podcast stream for a variety of devices though, so I’ll try something when I can.
Yes I agree with everyone’s comments here. You just can’t satisfy everyone you know. How could you know the whole movie just by these trailers, I think that people who do this are just jealous that DC/Warner Bros has a huge hit on their hands. Believe me this movie will break records maybe even the 2 billion $$$ mark.
Thanks for listening. I’m sure BvS will be a success.
Excellent episode Doctor! I just wanna say Thank You for making and uploading this episode just a few days after the Trailer, it was a nice surprise I must admit.
I just wanna comment something that YouTuber Samuel Otten pointed out in his own analysis, and is that when Henry Cavill went say “The world doesn’t share your opinion”, he did so in a reluctant manner. That’s interesting because even though it’s true (most of the world loves Superman) and that’s something he had to say as a counterargument, Clark himself isn’t very happy about how many people sees him as a God. He never asked for people to build him a statue, he didn’t went to Mexico just for people to treat him as a Messiah, and I’m sure he isn’t content with some calling him “False God” when he NEVER claimed to be nor acted as a deity of some sort.
You could see in Cavill’s face the hesitation to say that, he really is a gifted actor. I sincerely hope that this film cements him as a Hollywood star and the definite Superman, assuming MoS didn’t made that already. 😛
Good highlight, I’ll definitely check out Sam’s video when I get home.
Hi Dr Awkward,
since they already incorporated doomsday in BvS, what are the chances that Snyder will adapt the death of superman?? Will superman die in BvS??
As with Man of Steel, BvS is getting inspiration from many sources. I imagine the Death of Superman will be one of those influences, but be “adapted” as much as The Dark Knight Returns is adapted in BvS. I don’t expect at Death of Superman in this continuity or for Superman to die in BvS.
I wouldn’t panic, as the Doctor said, BvS is hardly an adaptation of any storyline, since I don’t recall seeing neither Luthor nor Wonders in either DoSM or TDKR, they are taking the best of those stories and making them work together.
Plus, our Supes is relatively new to both the people in the film and us, the audience. Killing him, even if he would eventually revive in JL, would have little to absolutely no effect in anyone whatsoever, I’m sure Snyder is well aware that doing such move would be pointless (and he wouldn’t let his favorite superhero die in his watch, 😉 so I wouldn’t worry).
Great episode, as usual.
I especially liked your points about trust underlying Clark and Bruce’s interaction, and Doomsday being an opportunity for both Superman and Batman to redeem themselves from their performance during the Black Zero Event (Superman, who I think was a true hero in Man of Steel but who could this time try to bring about a resolution without having to kill the villain, and Batman, who was powerless to do much of anything during the BZE). I also like the idea of them needing Wonder Woman to have success in taking on this new threat.
I’m very curious about Diana’s role now. I suspect that Bruce and Diana will have interactions and Bruce will not actually know her secret, although he will have figured out Clark’s early on, I think.
Minor correction: The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum is on the campus of Michigan State University, in East Lansing, MI, not Chicago. (MSU is my alma mater, and I had some friends outside the museum during the filming.)
I like that Diana has her own agency and isn’t just Batman’s ally, definitely a question mark on that one.
Thanks for listening and the correction, definitely my mistake!
Thanks for this analysis, Doc. I was pretty shaken seeing this trailer for the first time, as I thought it was pretty bad as far as trailers go: choppy editing, over-the-top music, obvious mashups of scenes, clunky comic timing. But everything you said makes sense, and, truthfully, after watching a few more times over the past week, I’ve already gotten used to things that troubled me about it.
The foremost is probably Eisenberg’s performance. I immediately defended his casting, but I thought he was way too much in this trailer. But then I thought about previous trailers and how his performance in those felt more measured. It makes perfect sense that they’d want audiences to get used to the more outlandish end of the spectrum with what he’s doing in order to manage expectations, so I’m a little calmer now.
Divorcing what we were shown from the way we were shown it was a helpful exercise as well, because there was a ton of great footage here. I found a few supercut trailers that at least showed this footage in a different context and I was able to appreciate it more, but I have yet to find a supercut that included all footage and was also a great trailer.
And your observations about Doomsday I think are spot-on. Looking at that sequence as presented in the trailer it’s obvious that it’s spliced together from at least 2 different sequences from the same scene or two totally different scenes. So I don’t think that this is necessarily how Doomsday or Wonder Woman will be revealed to us or our heroes in the film, but just an easy way to have them be presented in the trailer in a “story” type of way. Even though it felt like the trailer gave away too much, thinking about it, there’s clearly a lot more that we have yet to learn. For instance, that giant blast that Doomsday apparently creates in this trailer is the same one that Wonder Woman apparently creates in the previous trailer. And, honestly, based on the look of the blast and what it does, I doubt either of them cause that.
Also, in Man of Steel, as you’ve detailed, the Kryptonian armor is so durable as to withstand all terrestrial weapons as well as every Kryptonian hit. The only time any Kryptonian armor is pierced by anything is when Kal hits Faora’s hand in Smallville with his heat vision. So we know heat vision has to be able to do at least some damage to a Kryptonian, armored or not. And yet, in that shot where Wonder Woman has blocked a blast, and her shield cools down, Superman is behind her, having blocked the same blast with only his arms. If this were Doomsday’s blast, and his blast were as powerful as Kal’s, it would have done way more damage to Superman. So either it’s not Doomsday’s blast or his blasts are simply not as powerful, or perhaps not as concentrated, as Superman’s.
Another thing in this trailer is the scene where Armored Batman is wailing on Superman in that room, you can clearly see blood pouring out of Kal’s nose and mouth. “Do you bleed…? You will” indeed. Now, the only time any Kryptonian bleeds in Man of Steel is either on Krypton or when Kal enters Zod’s ship and experiences Kryptonian atmosphere for the first time. In other words, when they’re not “super.” As far as I recall (and you would know more than I, so correct me if I’m wrong), at no point in any of the Kryptonian slugfests does anyone ever draw blood. And yet, Batman draws blood as he punches Superman. So it’s likely that Batman is weakening Superman here and Kryptonite is the likely culprit, but we still don’t know anything about how it works into this story or universe, and we didn’t get any glimpse of it in this trailer.
We also still haven’t heard Wonder Woman speak, we don’t know what brought her here, and we really don’t know anything that might happen between Clark and Bruce meeting and them coming to blows later on. So, yeah, there are still a ton of unknowns.
Also, great catch about the Scout Ship. When I was watching the trailer right before listening to this I thought I saw what looked like the birthing matrices in the “Frankenstein” shot, and this really confirms that. That’s also a very clever use of what we’ve already been introduced to, so that makes me feel like they’re really thinking things through. And looking at that plaza, if the Superman statue is roughly in the middle, it seems to be about six blocks in area, which means it would be the entire ground zero of the Black Zero attack. This would quell a complaint I regularly read where people say “They already rebuilt Metropolis?” because, of course, they think the entire city was levelled. So it’s possible they didn’t rebuild anything, and instead turned the entire area into a plaza/memorial, which makes a lot of sense.
Wow, sorry, didn’t realize I spouted off so much!
Wish there was an edit function now…
Ha, no big deal, I liked your thoughts. I added a simple edit plug-in that should allow for edits up to 5 minutes without everyone having to register before posting. Hopefully it works fine.
Sweet, thanks. I really have to thank you again for this entry, because I was at my Comic Shop this morning and everyone was bashing the trailer, but I was able to calm them all down using the arguments and logic you presented here. It worked wonders, really.
Another thing I realized about a trailer like this is that it’s better for the film if fans go in with lowered expectations and the G.A. goes in with raised ones. Fans are much harsher critics, so tempering their expectations will certainly result in more measured responses. And, as all the guys at my shop said today after saying they hated the trailer “I mean, I’m gonna see it anyway.”
WB doesn’t need to do work to get these guys in the theater, they need to make sure they don’t come in too hot. For the rest of the audience, they need to make sure they get them in the theater at all, and something like this seems to be working. BoxOffice.com tracks twitter responses and lists them as a ratio of positive to negative, and the reaction has been averaging about 8:1 positive, so that’s reassuring.
Just read this, too: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/12/08/batman-v-superman-trailer-goes-unchallenged-on-twitter/
Apparently, the new BvS trailer generated more buzz in its first week than the Civil War trailer did for its first week. So that’s good news, because that CW trailer was awesome.
Also worth noting that the BvS Comic Con trailer still ranks as #5 in year-to-date trailer buzz, after 2 Star Wars trailers, Hunger Games, and Insurgent (of all things).
Haha, yeah, I love that genre media has really exploded in popularity… but sadly it brings with it some of the negatives of that culture. Why did The Simpsons mock their Comic Book Guy as saying everything was the “Worst Thing Ever!” It’s because there’s a cultural aspect to fandom where if the thing is anything short of perfection, it can’t just be great, good, or okay… it suddenly has to be “the worst.” So I try not to worry about views that polarized, especially, like you say, when general audiences aren’t so extreme in their judgment.
Lots of great details and insights. I actually had about 40 minutes more of really detailed analysis trying to work out the sequence of things and commenting on Wonder Woman, but I ultimately cut it for time and because I think people are reacting so strongly to feeling like they have an outline of the film, the last thing I needed to do was provide an ordered break-down of when each shot happens. That said, I definitely agree with a lot of the little details you picked up.
Regarding Lex, I’m not sure if it will be next episode or what (I still have leftover notes from skipping him in the recent mailbag), but I want to do a Lex episode and bring up Tesla who has a lot of interesting parallels. I think in the general legend about Edison frustrating Tesla, we get a narrative of him as something of a beset and isolated nerd without the pull or charisma of Edison… but in actual historical fact, Tesla was a people-person much like Lex in the beginning. It doesn’t seem like a real person but there are real people who don’t seem like real persons. 😉
Really? Allow me to say that I would totally love to hear your insight in Lex Luthor. I can’t fathom why some people have such a hard time accepting this take on Lex, I mean, isn’t Eisenberg embracing everything that makes Lex Luthor Lex Luthor?
Every single incarnation from comics, movies, TV is always cracking occasional jokes, has a hipster masquerade, is self-centered, arrogant, full of himself and hides all that sadism and manipulative side under a goofy persona mask. Eisenberg is doing all that and more, why some still dislike him is beyond me, and hopefully will be too for the mayority.
Thanks, it’ll come out eventually, I hope.
We’re about three months away and I have time to record maybe two episode a week maximum.
So I’m trying to plan out what should be in those six episodes.
There’s not enough time to do exhaustive commentary on the rest of MOS, especially since BvS / DCCU news is going to come faster probably. But I might just do a full audio commentary. I have someone who wants to cohost that but our schedules never sync up. Sorry, just rambling out loud.
Have you listened to the “Tysto” fan commentary podcast, Doctor? A lot of his entries are solo recordings, and they work just as well as the ones with cohosts, especially when he has a lot to talk about the film, fanboy-wise and “making of the film”-wise. (Although I do kinda hope to find out what it’s like when you have someone else to bounce ideas off of.)
hi, I this video explains some very good points about the new trailer for bvs:dawn of justice. I thout you may find it interesting. Below is the link.
Hi Phil,
sorry man but that interview it appears to be a fake one: http://batman-news.com/2015/12/14/doomsday-patrick-tatopoulos-nope/
Yeah, I figured that out and Doc thankfully deleted my posts. Guess I jumped the gun, but it did seem real. At least I wasn’t the only one taken in. Most sites haven’t even corrected it yet!
Sorry for the false alarm…
No worries, even though it was fake, I think that hoax was a nice gesture, as user ottensj in the “Superman Homepage” said:
The good thing to come out of the fake report is that it shows the whole movie is NOT given away by the trailers. If the whole movie was given away already, no one would have bought the story for a second because if you know the full movie, you know exactly how Doomsday fits into all of it. I think the fake story revealed that people are making lots of assumptions about the glimpses we’ve seen in the trailer, and there’s still a lot we don’t know. In fact, it’s impossible for us to even know what we don’t know.
AMIT – I just watched that video too. I think the inside information on the art work and it’s connection to the story is uncanny.