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Published Mar 25, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT
Shawn S. Lealos is an entertainment writer who is a voting member of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. He has written for Screen Rant, CBR, ComicBook, The Direct, The Sportster, Chud, 411mania, Renegade Cinema, Yahoo Movies, and many more.
Shawn has a bachelor's degree in professional writing and a minor in film studies from the University of Oklahoma. He also has won numerous awards, including several Columbia Gold Circle Awards and an SPJ honor.
He also wrote Dollar Deal: The Story of the Stephen King Dollar Baby Filmmakers, the first official book about the Dollar Baby film program. Shawn is also currently writing his first fiction novel under a pen name, based in the fantasy genre.
To learn more, visit his website at shawnlealos.net.
It has been 10 years since Zack Snyder did something no one had ever attempted before in the world of DC Comics movies. Snyder got his break in Hollywood doing geek-friendly properties. After knocking it out of the park with his Dawn of the Dead remake, he then tackled comic book properties with 300 and Watchmen.
This led Warner Bros. to offer Zack Snyder a deal he couldn't refuse. After Christopher Nolan brought DC back to popularity with his Dark Knight trilogy, Warner Bros. offered Snyder the chance to direct Man of Steel, bringing back Superman in a movie for the first time in almost three decades. That led to Snyder taking control of the DCEU.
Zack Snyder Finally Delivered A Long-Awaited DC Super Fight
On March 25, 2016, Zack Snyder released Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, and it marked the first time that DC's two biggest superheroes fought each other on the big screen. Batman and Superman have been around in movies since the Golden Age of cinema, and for modern-day filmmaking, it started in 1978.
In 1966, Batman hit the big time with his live-action television series, although it was more tongue-in-cheek with Adam West and Burt Ward playing a more kitsch version of the character. In 1978, Superman hit it big in the movies, with Christopher Reeve playing a beacon of hope in a world that needed it.
After four Superman movies, with the last two critically slammed, Tim Burton brought Batman to the big screen in 1989 with Michael Keaton, and a dark, gothic appearance that moved far away from the previous TV show. However, that franchise also died off thanks to its last two movies. This led to Christopher Nolan reinventing Batman again.
Zack Snyder then got the chance to do something that had never been done before. Snyder got the rights to make a DC shared universe, starting with Man of Steel. Instead of introducing Batman and leading to their big team-up, Snyder jumped straight to the fight in Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice.
For the first time in the movie world, Batman and Superman showed up in the same movie, but they fought each other. It ended up genuinely controversial because Batman started killing people (which he also did in Burton's Batman movies), and the film had a big task ahead of it by telling two different stories in one film.
What Makes Batman Vs. Superman So Polarizing?
The biggest problem with Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice is that Zack Snyder tried to do way too much in one movie. First up, it tried to tell the Batman vs. Superman storyline and presented Batman as someone who was not only willing to kill villains, but he also set out to murder Superman, just in case.
The idea that Batman wanted to kill Superman just because he was an alien on Earth who might someday pose a threat was ridiculous. This was the case where Batman wanted to kill a superhero who had only done good to help society because he was an alien, and he didn't trust him to remain good.
That was bad, but what hurt the movie even worse was that it tried to cram too much into one film. This movie took Batman vs. Superman and then crammed in the Death of Superman storyline with Doomsday at the end. It also threw in Lex Luthor and introduced Wonder Woman. This was all in one single movie.
This could have been so much better if Zack Snyder had introduced it as two movies, with Batman vs. Superman in the first film, possibly hinting at Wonder Woman's arrival there. The sequel could have then moved on to the Death of Superman storyline, and Lex Luthor could have been the device to tie them together.
In the end, Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice ended up with a 28% Rotten Tomatoes score, and even the audience score was lower, at only 63%. While there was a Wonder Woman, Shazam!, Flash, and Blue Beetle movie to follow, Zack Snyder only had one more DCEU movie to make after that.
How Batman Vs. Superman Helped Lead To James Gunn's DCU
Zack Snyder tried to rebound from the lack of critical and audience response with Justice League. However, a lot of things went wrong during the making of that movie, sadly starting with Snyder's daughter dying and then Joss Whedon taking over and delivering a movie whose RT and audience scores compared to Batman V Superman.
Zack Snyder rebounded when the "Release the Snyder Cut" movement helped him get a director's cut released on HBO Max, which has a 71% RT score and an impressive 92% audience score. However, that ended his run with the DCEU, and Warner Bros. moved in a different direction with James Gunn taking control.
The biggest swing here was that a large portion of the fandom was tired of the grim-dark ideas of Batman killing people and Superman's darker persona. Society seemed to need the optimistic and good-hearted Superman back, and that is what James Gunn sold his vision on, as he brought the comics back to the movies.
Zack Snyder and James Gunn are friends and even worked together on Dawn of the Dead, but their visions of the DC heroes are strikingly different. That said, for one instance, 10 years ago, Snyder did something no one had attempted before and brought Superman and Batman together on the big screen.
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