JVL has serious doubts about the new Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice trailer. I, on the other hand, am pretty much sold:
I've said all along that for this movie to work, you have to have a reason for Batman to team up, at least briefly, with Lex Luthor. You have to give him a reason to fear and hate Superman. And, frankly, there are lots of reasons to fear and hate Superman after the events of Man of Steel! It's silly for us, the audience, to blame Superman for the destruction caused in that film: we know what happened and we know what Zod intended. But the rest of the world did not receive our privileged view of that struggle.
I love—love—the shot of Bruce Wayne running into the plume of smoke caused by the collapsing skyscraper. I think Wonder Woman looks great. I think it makes sense to consider how the world would react to an super-powered alien showing up on planet Earth. I think Eisenberg's Luthor is ... well, JVL might be right about that one. The only moving image Luthor that's ever been done even close to right is the Bruce Timm animated version. And this does not seem to be that. Even with that caveat, I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that this looks better than literally every Christopher Reeve Superman film, and by a wide margin at that.
Even more fascinating than the Batman v. Superman trailer, however, is the Suicide Squad trailer:
There's a not-negligible chance that this film will be a financial train wreck of epic proportions from which the nascent DC Cinematic Universe never recovers. There are so many different characters and so many of them look so ... nontraditional that I imagine the prospect of sitting through this will be a tough sell to an audience that will be nearing comic book exhaustion by the time this film is released in August—after Deadpool in February, Batman v. Superman in March, Captain America: Civil War in May, and X-Men: Apocalypse later in May, but before Gambit in October and Dr. Strange in November. When audiences hear a line like "Let's just say I threw them in the hole and thew away the hole," are they going to react with anything other than an eye roll? Hard to say.
That being said. I'm remarkably excited for this feature. I'm in. I'm sold. In part, that's because it's by a filmmaker I love, David Ayer (director of the criminally underrated Street Kings as well as the marginally underrated End of Watch and Fury). In part because it looks so insane. After a raft of utterly safe, entirely predictable superhero movies, I'm looking forward to one with the capacity to surprise. And, finally, because it looks like it's going to be, in part, a Harley Quinn origin story and Harley Quinn is played by the delightfully charming Margot Robbie (Wolf of Wall Street, Focus), who, were I king, would be the biggest female star in Hollywood.
So, like I said: I'm in. I'm in for Batman v. Superman and I'm in for Suicide Squad, both of which look far more interesting than anything Marvel's done with their cinematic universe. Warner Brothers didn't even need to fly me out for a junket or nothin' to earn my acquiescence. (Not that I'd, you know, be opposed.) But they also didn't really have to convince me. I'm an easy lay. Let's see how the rest of the world responds.