‘Batman v Superman’ posters hint at the film’s violent clash

I often wonder how much notice studios get of each other's plans. I've been in rooms where marketing departments had their giant war charts up, and it looks like they're all fairly well wired together, and there's a sense that they try to each maximize the way and the timing of major announcements about their films. Those plans can be complicated by a million different factors, though, none of which they control, and so you may spend months trying to decide when and how to release your first trailer for something, only to see it leak days before, throwing off your entire plan.

It also probably doesn't help that “Star Wars” has dominated the conversation since Thursday. That was a given. All they had to do was include footage of Han Solo in action, and they knew it would blow social media up completely. Warner originally planned to stay out of things completely until Monday, when they have their special IMAX trailer event planned. Instead, thanks to the leak of the blurry foreign language version, they pushed the trailer release forward, and now Zack Snyder's tweets today of the first two teaser posters come after the trailer, not before.

If these were the first things released, I'd be curious to hear the reaction. There's this one…

… and this one…

… and they both seem well-suited to what appears to be the approach of the film, the tone of everyone's nerves already raw, a planet not sure what to make of this strange invader. I like it, and I think these are pretty spiffy early teaser images. When you've got icons as instantly recognizable as the bat shield and the Superman “S,” you can play, and you can try some radical things, because they'll still be recognizable.

“Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice” is in theaters March 25, 2016.

×