Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice

On Wednesday night, the tweets started flying out of CinemaCon, claiming that Justice League’s announced runtime was a luxurious two hours and 50 minutes long. Articles were posted, fans were by turns excited or outraged, and IMDb was updated. The thing is, none of these reports were confirmed and the movie’s not coming out until November. It’s not even close to done.

It would appear that the likes of Deadpool and Logan, what with all their foul words and visible bloodletting and brief pegging interludes, have changed the game of superhero movies. It was once basic showbiz logic that a massively-budgeted capes-and-tights flick couldn‘t afford to go for the R rating and lose the portion of the audience that’d restrict. More minor one-off projects like Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and Kingsman could take that risk and repeatedly found that it paid off, but now mainstream heroes have adopted this more daring approach and met with attractive box-office receipts. And in keeping with their tried-and-true business strategy of doing everything Marvel does, but a year later, DC Films has no stated their intention to get into more mature material.

A new Batman vehicle demands, in a more literal sense, a new Batman vehicle. As Ben Affleck prepares to don the cape and cowl once more to reprise the role of Bruce Wayne in Zack Snyder’s upcoming Justice League movie, modifications have also been made to his singular whip, the teched-out Batmobile. Snyder applied his bigger-is-better filmmaking ethic to the Batmobile in last year‘s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, diverging from Christopher Nolan’s utilitarian, industrial look towards something a little more tanklike. And today, Snyder’s taken to his favored social media channel of Vero to offer fans an advance look at what the latest edition of the Batmobile has to offer.

One of the side effects of CGI is our inability to appreciate the effort that goes into a good movie scene. A few decades ago, you could look at a shot from a movie and instinctively know how much time and energy went into it. You could see the production design, the costumes, the makeup, the lighting, all of which required people to make real things with their hands and put them in front of the camera. These days, we just chalk everything up to computers without thinking much about what that means.

Q: Given the premise of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and the studio's intent to launch Justice League from it, was the movie doomed from the start? — @CrookedKnight A: That movie has Some Problems, friends.

It’s no secret that Zack Snyder productions rely heavily on visual effects: every set involves green-screen, every shot it color-graded to within an inch of its life. Batman v. Superman is a superhero story of epic proportions, and as such required a ton of enhancements in post-production. A new VFX reel breaks down a bunch of key shots to show us everything that was never actually there during the shoot.

If the world was short on Wonder Woman collectibles in the past, that soon won't be an issue any longer. Since the cinematic debut of the Amazonian warrior princess in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, Wonder Woman has been a big part of collectible lines from a number of companies like Matte, DC Collectibles, and Sideshow Collectibles. It's not that Diana wasn't getting any attention in the past, but her percentages compared to Batman and Superman have surely improved over the past year. 2017 should be even better for Wonder Woman, what with her own movie coming out and all, but there are still some folks making up ground on her arrival last year. Such is the case with the new Premium Format Figure from Sideshow, which shows Wonder Woman readying for battle against Doomsday at the conclusion of Batman V Superman.

Here’s something that bothered me about that Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice nightmare sequence: why does he continue to wear the mask? I get the body armor; I can even set aside the whole ‘Batman-doesn’t-kill’ thing and accept the machine gun he wears during the sequence. But why the mask? If we assume that the world has ended, there’s no real reason for him to keep his civilian identity a secret, and it’s not like audiences were going to be confused at who Ben Affleck was playing in the movie. Has Bruce Wayne just gotten used to getting up every morning and putting on eye blac

One of my favorite parts of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was Gal Gadot’s costume as Wonder Woman. Not only was it a much-needed splash of color in an otherwise monochrome film, it was also a nice departure from the overly bulky superhero costumes that have become the norm. Ben Affleck might be a great Batman, but there were times when he looked a little bit like Ralphie’s brother in A Christmas Story, too padded up to put his arms down, let alone fight his way through a warehouse of bad guys. Wonder Woman, on the other hand, looked every bit the agile warrior we were hoping for.

Since arriving on the scene, Prime 1 Studio has been delivering the goods. The company's high-end statues have been impeccable, though pricey, creations that have not only captured their subjects with incredible detail, but with personality as well. It's hard to find any flaws in Prime 1's catalog already, but this new Wonder Woman 1:2 scale statue might have set a new bar for what to expect from the company.