Batman V Superman Events The Trailers Spoiled

In the months leading up to the theatrical release of the cumbersomely-titled Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, fans were bombarded with an unending barrage of trailers that seemed to give away nearly every major plot point in the whole film, leaving very little to the imagination. Now that we've finally seen the film, it turns out that the trailers really did spill pretty much all of those beans prematurely. If you were paying any kind of attention, almost nothing about Dawn of Justice was a surprise. Here are the best moments of the film that the trailers completely, utterly destroyed. Spoilers ahead...but if you've seen the trailers, it's already too late.

The reveal of Batman's most awesome accessories should have been a moment where the audience stood up and cheered, like during the big reveal of the Millennium Falcon in The Force Awakens, but instead of awe and amazement, the Batmobile was just that car from the trailer. We knew what it did, how it looked, and how it would get wrecked in a crash against Superman's steel bod—even without setting foot into a theater. Granted, Batman's wonderful toys are indeed wonderful, but early reveals just made these events joyless.

Doomsday powers up one of his out-of-character nuclear blasts and aims it at Batman, and after a brief, un-Batman-like expletive, Wonder Woman magically appears and shields the Dark Knight using her magical armaments. This was supposed to be Wonder Woman's big, in-costume, super-heroic reveal, but again, this exact sequence of events was very plainly and repeatedly shown in the trailer footage. Batman was never in any danger, and we knew it. When there's no real danger, there's no excitement, and if you were still awake at this point, you were just wasting some perfectly good nap time.

The awkward, contentious meeting between Bruce Wayne, a billionaire businessman, and Clark Kent, a dorky reporter, more or less framed the battle between two different kinds of heroism that Batman and Superman were both fighting for. It wasn't a great conversation, and Netflix's Daredevil already did it better, but at least it was a potentially fun moment to witness, enhanced only by the insane, pubescent Lex Luthor's nonsensical ramblings. But the whole conversation had already been released a few months earlier. Too bad.

You didn't have to be Batman to put together that Lex would use Kryptonian space junk to turn General Zod's corpse into Doomsday, based solely on the explicitly expository Dawn of Justice commercials. Zod's 18-month-old corpse, Lex wringing his hands over some kryptonite—it's elementary stuff. Doomsday could have been anything, but they had to make him Zod, or at least the baby that Lex Luthor and Zod's dead body somehow made together in the Kryptonian life soup chamber. Spoiler alert—unless you saw the trailer.

Yet again, the main villain's big reveal was a core element of the Batman v Superman trailers. Most sensible movies attempt to hide the big bad guy from the audience until at least a few weeks after the premiere, since the thrill of the reveal is a pretty huge motivating factor to actually get out of the house and into a sticky theater. The Marvel Cinematic Universe hides the bad guys nearly every time, so seeing them is actually exciting. We already knew that this film was all about Batman and Superman having a bro-fight to solve the eternal question of who would win, so even admitting to the presence of a real villain was foolish to begin with.

Even before Senator Finch informed the weirdly skeevy Lex Luthor that she wouldn't be providing him with the kryptonite he wanted so that he could make a bullet for Superman, we'd already seen Lex hovering over a glowing mass of the green rock. It hardly mattered how he got it later, because what Lex can't manipulate into his own hands, he steals, which is precisely what happened. The whole scene with Senator Finch could have just been left out, because all roads lead to wherever the trailer already told us they led.

Superman is about to drop an effortless smackdown on Batman, so he takes a swing... but Batman blocks the punch, against all odds. Superman incredulously looks at his own arm, because that's a natural thing to do when your punch has been blocked: blame your arm and inspect it for flaws. It's not a smart moment, but it's a very comic book moment, which the gloomy and angry Dawn of Justice is sorely lacking throughout most of its run time. Yet again, we already knew that Batman's crazy armor could hold up against Superman, so not a single punch bore a sense of danger.

For some reason, Bruce Wayne has developed the power of prophecy in the DC Expanded Universe, and he has a lot of dreams about stuff that may happen in the future. From flying out of the newly-discovered Batcave on the power of holy, tornadic bat-wind, to seeing Darkseid's parademons fly over an insignia-bearing field, every scene with Batman was just a weird question mark about its veracity. Remember how Marvel revealed Thanos? It wasn't in the trailer, and leaving the Darkseid reveal to Lex freaking out in his cell would have been pretty solid stuff.