So we’ve got to talk about something that happens in the first 15 minutes of the film. But it’s a spoiler…kinda.

 

 

Still here? Good. Either you’ve already so the movie or don’t care what happens.

In Batman V. Superman, Jimmy Olsen isn’t the typical buddy/chum of Superman. In it, he is a secret CIA operative that gets killed at the beginning of the film. Olsen is at the receiving of a bullet, but happens so fast that I didn’t even notice it was said character until I wind of it later. Thanks to Birth. Movies. Death., I later found out why Snyder took the route of dispatching the character in a quick manner:

Snyder:

“We just did it as this little aside because we had been tracking where we thought the movies were gonna go, and we don’t have room for Jimmy Olsen in our big pantheon of characters, but we can have fun with him, right?”

Jesse Eisenberg was actually wanted for the role in hopes to catching the audience off guard when the character was killed off. But that changed when Eisenberg met with Snyder about playing Olsen.

Snyder again:

“I said, ‘I want to do this misdirect and you’d be great. You’d be a great Jimmy Olsen,’” the director says. “And he’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s cool,’ and he was being very Jesse in the meeting. Introverted but constantly going, ‘Okay, I see, uh-huh. So it’s sort of a pop-culture redirect, you’re gonna do, because of the certain status of an actor…”

 “I was like, ‘Wow, that guy is crazy… Debbie, what about Jesse as Lex?”

Snyder had been meeting with Bryan Cranston in hopes to take the role of Lex Luthor but decided to try Eisenberg instead for a younger version.

“Bryan Cranston would have been great, right? And by the way, he’s an amazing actor. Can you imagine how different the movie would be?”

And so we got the version that is now in the DCCU cannon. The feelings on Eisenberg are mixed to negative, but if Cranston had been cast, we might’ve gotten a different and maybe even better film.