Spoiler Alert: Please do not read on if you have not already seen “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.”
At the end of “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” Superman nemesis Lex Luthor tells Batman that the fight with the CGI monster Doomsday caught the attention of something worse out in the far reaches of the universe.
The allusion to Darkseid, one of the DC comic universe’s most prominent big bads, was obvious to comic fans, but left other folks scratching their heads since there had been no hint that there was a greater villain in the shadows or that Lex would know about it if there was.
While not providing a massive amount of clarity, a deleted scene that Warner Bros. unceremoniously dropped on YouTube today (view above) does at least explain why Lex would have some knowledge of a greater threat like Darkseid.
The clip shows a SWAT team invading the crashed Kryptonian ship in Metropolis to arrest Lex after Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman have taken down Doomsday.
They find him interacting with some sort of demonic figure who is holding three boxes. The figure, and its boxes, dissipate as the SWAT members enter the room. Presumably Lex has been using the ship to communicate with aliens, and this is one of them — he’s presented in the same sort of gray pixel form we saw the Kryptonians using on their video phones in “Man of Steel.”
Unless Zack Snyder and Co. are taking some pretty remarkable creative liberties with the character, that’s not Darkseid himself. But Darkseid rules over a hellish, fire-covered planet called Apokalips, so that this figure looks like a demon probably isn’t coincidental.
The boxes the demon is holding are likely Mother Boxes (though until somebody in one of these movies actually refers to them by name that’s technically a guess). We previously saw a cool magic box in Cyborg’s metahuman video that Bruce Wayne watched earlier in the film, and that was also probably a Mother Box.
Why this 45-second clip was removed from the film is anybody’s guess. It feels like a crucial excision given the important context it adds to the ending as well as the tease.
Watch the video above.