Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice just gets curiouser and curiouser. Earlier today, Warner Bros. released a totally bizarre (to say the least) deleted scene from the film, which appeared to incorporate a couple of crucial elements from the DC comic book universe. Although ultimately cut from the theatrical version, Zack Snyder confirms that at least one of those things appears elsewhere in the film — you may have spotted it during Cyborg’s cameo.

So this is where things get a little confusing. That weird deleted scene with Lex involved an alien monster that sort of resembled DC’s Steppenwolf, a member of Darkseid’s Elite Forces. In the scene he’s holding three boxes, which seem to be Mother Boxes (TL;DR — a super-powered alien item with lots of abilities, like messing with space and time), but according to Zack Snyder, we already saw a Mother Box in Batman v Superman.

It appears during the Justice League cameo sequence, when Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne and Gal Gadot’s Diana Prince watch Lex’s secret metahuman files, featuring Ezra Miller’s Flash, Jason Momoa’s Aquaman and Ray Fisher’s Cyborg. As depicted in the Cyborg file, Dr. Stone struggles to save his son, Victor, finally achieving success with the help of a strange, shape-shifting box.

As Snyder confirms to EW, this was Cyborg’s origin story, and that box is an important part of the DC universe:

That’s the first glimpse of the Mother Box there. It was an agonizing birth.

Though Cyborg’s appearance was brief and he won’t have his own solo film until 2020, Snyder teases a bigger role for the hero in Justice League:

I really wanted to show Cyborg’s birth because I feel like he plays such a strong part coming up, and I really wanted to give a sense of him. I really want [the audience] to know how far he’s come.

But if that was a Mother Box in the Cyborg cameo, then what were the boxes that weird alien was holding in the deleted scene with Lex Luthor? More Mother Boxes? Sure, why not. Maybe tomorrow we’ll learn that the alien’s name is actually Martha.

Justice League: Part One hits theaters next fall. Ray Fisher’s Cyborg movie arrives on April 3, 2020.

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