We need Lex Luthor now more than ever
Homelander, Black Adam, Omni-Man — it’s like you can’t shake a stick these days without tapping the bicep of some evil version of Superman. And that’s leaving out the evil or darkly conflicted versions of the actual Superman in projects like Injustice, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, or the Snyderverse movies.
The going Hollywood wisdom is that the classic, morally infallible, effortlessly do-gooding Superman doesn’t sell blockbusters, even though it’s been roughly three decades since anyone actually put that version of the character on the big (live-action) screen. But Superman the Hero of Heroes isn’t the only thing we’re losing here. When we make the Man of Steel an antihero, it also muddles his villains.
And it’s really too bad that Hollywood hasn’t figured out how to do a standard Superman story, because the world could use a lesson in how to spot a Lex Luthor. Lex Luthor, the celebrity billionaire. Lex Luthor, whose company builds rockets to space. Lex Luthor, former president of the United States. Whatever my other, significant complaints about Batman v Superman, Snyder wasn’t wrong to look at the guy who played Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network and think, “That’s my Lex.”
Today’s Lex Luthor straddles the line between writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster’s mad scientist, who battled Superman with ray guns, earthquake machines, dirigibles, and death traps, and writer-artist John Byrne’s 1986 reinvention of him as a CEO of the “greed is good” era, who pitted his mind, his money, and the freedom it afforded him against the Man of Steel.
Just as Superman is one of our most elemental superheroes, Lex is one of our most elemental villains. Like the Joker, his origin story is negligible — its
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