Even as somebody who quite liked Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, my longtime Superman fan heart couldn’t quite square a few of the film’s elements.
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One of those was the death of a man who, according to offscreen interviews, was in fact Jimmy Olsen.
In the comics, of course, Jimmy has served a number of roles, “cub reporter,” photographer, TV presenter and blogger among them. His most important role, though, is as “Superman’s pal,” as the name of his long-running ongoing comic book series boasted.
It was in his capactiy as photojournalist that Jimmy was introduced in Batman v Superman, but it wasn’t long before he was revealed to be CIA and executed before Lois’s eyes.
“We just did it as this little aside because we had been tracking where we thought the movies were gonna go,” director Zack Snyder said, “and we don’t have room for Jimmy Olsen in our big pantheon of characters, but we can have fun with him, right?”
In the theatrical version of the film, Olsen was never named — but in the Ultimate Cut, he was — and that’s actually what gives them a potential “out” for bringing in the “real” Jimmy if they want to down the line.
Doing so would, ironically, make them the second recent Superman adaptation to kill off “Jimmy Olsen” only to replace him with “the real Jimmy Olsen: Smallville did it just a few years ago. Olsen, fo course, also appears as a series regular on Supergirl, coming to The CW in the fall. In every instance, he’s got a long history with the Daily Planet and/or Superman.
So…what makes me think this Olsen might not be all he’s cracked up to be? Simple: when he meets Lois, he isn’t their regular photographer, and in fact is somebody she’s never met. He introduces himself as Jimmy Olsen, but there’s no recognition there.
No suspicion, either, though. It opens up the door to the possibility that this isn’t the “real” Jimmy, but that there is a Jimmy Olsen out there somewhere. After all, if the CIA is going to replace Lois’s photographer at the last moment and infiltrate her interview without telling her, it would likely be a good idea to pick the name of an existing photographer, since Lois is after all an award-winning investigative journalist. If the name sounded familiar to her, but wasn’t somebody she’d ever worked with, it would help put her suspicion at ease and sow the seeds of Olsen as a person who exists in the film’s universe.
Fearing the actions of a god-like Super Hero left unchecked, Gotham City’s own formidable, forceful vigilante takes on Metropolis’s most revered, modern-day savior, while the world wrestles with what sort of hero it really needs. And with Batman and Superman at war with one another, a new threat quickly arises, putting mankind in greater danger than it’s ever known before.
