For the fourth anniversary of the release of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, director Zack Snyder hosted a live watch-along of the film, offering live commentary on the film that introduced Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne/Batman and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman as well as helped launch Warner Bros.‘ DC Extended Universe. Among the topics Snyder discussed while watching the film virtually with fans was the fate of the film’s Jimmy Olsen. Snyder confirmed that Jimmy really did die in the film and explained why, as it was part of the larger world the film was building.
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In Batman v Superman, Jimmy Olsen (Michael Cassidy) is briefly seen working with Lois Lane (Amy Adams) as a photojournalist in Africa where she’s gone to interview a war criminal. However, turns out Jimmy isn’t really a photographer. He’s a CIA operative and he’s executed right in front of Lois. According to Snyder, making Jimmy a CIA operative is something he thought was “cool”.
“I just liked the idea that Jimmy was a spook for the CIA. I always felt like Jimmy, you know, never was capable, that capable, and to see him be like speak a foreign language,” Snyder said. “People always ask me if he’s dead, do we see him again, does he come back to life. I don’t think so. It implies a bigger universe. It implies that these dominos are falling as we go forward.”
This isn’t the first time that Snyder has spoken a bit about the choice made with Jimmy. In an interview around the time of the film’s release, Snyder explained that, in the grand scheme of things, there just wasn’t room for Jimmy Olsen in his take on the DC Universe.
“We just did it as this little aside because we have been tracking where we thought the movies were gonna go,” Snyder said at the time. “And we don’t have room for Jimmy Olsen in our big pantheon of characters, but we can have fun with him, right?”
The death of Jimmy Olsen isn’t the only somewhat controversial scene that Snyder spoke about during his watch-a-long, either. He also opened up a bit about the infamous Martha scene in the film, explaining that he was seeking to center the connection between the two warring heroes.
“It’s really this whole concept of branding criminals. The idea was that [Batman] had lost his own moral compass and he had become what he beheld,” Snyder said. “The whole idea of this movie is to create this arc where [Batman] confronts Superman’s humanity, that he finds himself again. That’s what the thesis of this thing is, that we’re all humans and that we all connect on a level. Our mothers have the same name. That is really sort of this fundamental, ‘we both have a mother, so we are both human.’ Even though Superman is from another planet, his connection to humanity is so clean that Batman is able to re-energize himself.”
What do you think about Snyder’s comments about Jimmy Olsen’s death? Let us know in the comments below.
