One side-effect to putting gigantic amounts of your movie into its own marketing a full year before it’s released: That leaves plenty of material for parody-artists to work with when taking you down a peg (unless, of course, you’re Deadpool and you’ve already done all the parodies yourself.) Case in point: Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, which has released so much pre-release advertising that it might be entirely possible to reconstruct something close to an entire movie from all the component parts - or to create some dramatically re-imagined alternate versions of the film’s now well-established central premise.
“Batman v Superman” as a rom-com? We tweaked the trailer to see what that would look like https://t.co/e1yBDDYXCK https://t.co/DwGFglkyel— WIRED (@WIRED) March 15, 2016
Case in point? Dawn of Just Us, which reimagines the macho superhero clash between Ben Affleck’s Caped Crusader and Henry Cavill’s Man of Steel as a lighthearted romantic comedy.
Incorporating footage from several of the widely-released Batman V Superman trailers and TV spots and some choice dialogue from elsewhere, the parody trailer reframes the hero-vs-hero dynamic into the story of two lonely-hearted superheroes from dramatically different backgrounds attempting to connect on a romantic level - despite an obviously uncoventional personal and professional situation and an (implied) third party complication in the form of Wonder Woman (with amusing emphasis placed on Jesse Eisenberg’s Bruce/Clark introduction scene).
What’s perhaps most noteworthy about the trailer is how plainly it presents the most different (from the actual film) aspect of its implied narrative. While the core of the satire is obviously to highlight how easily director Zack Snyder’s focus on glowering long stares and intense mutual fixation transforms from tough guy posturing to romantic longing with a simple change of pacing and music, the fact that it depicts a (hypothetical) same-sex relationship isn’t played for laughs or even presented as a “punchline;” but rather as the logical endpoint of recutting this particular trailer into the form of a standard Hollywood rom-com. That is, it doesn’t play appreciably different from how the same gag might be applied to a hero-vs-hero feature starring a man and a woman, two women or some other variation on the same, thus avoiding the easy laughs of “Ha ha, Batman and Superman are gay!” in favor of “Ha ha, a versus movie turns into a romance easier than you’d think!”
That feels like a small but noteworthy shift from the movie-parody zeitgeist of not too long ago, which often regarded even the laziest implication that two male characters would be a couple as a “joke” in and of itself (i.e. the way the internet video genre was dominated by “parodies” adding the Brokeback Mountain theme music to any trailer for a movie featuring a close male friendship (or rivalry) back in 2005). It’s also interesting since, while Hollywood has unquestionably become more LGBTQ-friendly in recent years, a big-budget mainstream romantic comedy featuring stars as big as Affleck and Cavill as a same-sex couple hasn’t yet been made for this parody to have used as a reference point; making the joke in some respects ahead-of-the-curve compared to its own subject matter (in addition to being a fun way to deflate the brooding self-seriousness of the film’s ad campaign).
Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice opens on March 25th, 2016, followed by Suicide Squad on August 5th, 2016; Wonder Woman on June 23rd, 2017; Justice League Part One on November 17th, 2017; The Flash on March 16th, 2018; Aquaman on July 27th, 2018; Shazam on April 5th, 2019; Justice League Part Two on June 14th, 2019; Cyborg on April 3rd, 2020; and Green Lantern Corps. on June 19th, 2020.
Source: Wired
