Who Is Brainiac? All You Need To Know About Superman 2’s Villain

James Gunn made a massive announcement about the villain of his Superman: Man of Tomorrow movie. Most people already guessed that the villain was going to be Brainiac, since it was already revealed that the villain was powerful enough to force Superman and Lex Luthor to team up to protect the Earth. However, Gunn’s big announcement was that he had cast Lars Eidinger to play the villain, which was an interesting choice, placing the relative unknown in the major villain role. Regardless of who plays the big bad in the next Superman movie, this is still an exciting announcement for fans of DC Comics, since Brainiac is one of the line’s most interesting and complex villains.

Here is everything you need to know about Brainiac and his history in DC Comics, as well as what you might expect from Superman: Man of Tomorrow.

Brainiac Has a Complex DC Comics History

Brainiac has a very confusing and complex history, not least of which is caused by the continued DC Comics retcons after events like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Flashpoint, and Rebirth. Originally, Brainiac appeared on Earth in Action Comics #242 in 1958 as an alien that provided a real threat to Superman as DC was beginning to delve more into sci-fi storytelling. Otto Binder and Al Plastino created the villain, who was a green-skinned alien from the planet Colu. From the start, he was the collector, shrinking down cities and bottling them up to keep with him.

Brainiac had a real connection with Superman, as he had already shrunk and captured the Kryptonian city of Kandor, and now he wanted to take Metropolis as well. Superman stopped him, and over the years, Brainiac changed from an alien into a robot that the people of Colu sent out to conquer other planets.

After Crisis on Infinite Earths, DC changed him again and had Brainiac as a Colu alien named Vril Dox, who was executed and whose consciousness attached itself to the body of a human man named Milton Fine, also giving him mental powers. He was part-human, part-alien, and he started creating new cloned bodies of himself, both the green-skinned ones and massive robotic forms, similar to what movie lovers saw in Terminator. This turned Brainiac into a threat to the entire planet.

However, Geoff Johns changed everything anyone knew about Brainiac, and he created a new mythos in the 2000s. Johns established that the real Brainiac had never met Superman, and all the previous versions were clones, robots, or in other controlled bodies. Instead, Brainiac had been in deep sleep all this time, and he finally showed up as a greater threat than he had ever been before. Even in his defeat, he launched an attack on Earth that killed Jonathan Kent, devastating Superman. It was also hinted at here that Brainiac had destroyed Krypton after shrinking down and taking Kandor.

More recent depictions of Brainiac continue to show him as a scientist named Vril Dox who collects cities from different worlds to “save them.” This version was a little different, as Vril made copies of himself to collect as many cities as possible, and the one in the New 52 took the form of the Internet. There have also been future variants of Brainiac, including a hero who was part of the Legion of Super-Heroes in the 31st century. There was also a horrific Brainiac in the new Absolute Superman, which is a rogue drone.

Which Brainiac Will We See In Superman: Man of Tomorrow?

While he is primarily a relative unknown to most comic book movie fans, James Gunn’s announcement that Lars Eidinger will play Brainiac is excellent news. According to Gunn on his Threads account, he didn’t choose Eidinger because of any past role, but because of the screen test that he conducted for Superman: Man of Tomorrow. Eidinger has some great performances under his belt already, with the German actor taking on an antagonistic role in the Noah Baumbach apocalyptic movie White Noise, where he played the mysterious Mr. Gray. He also looks perfect for Brainiac physically.

He isn’t the big, brawny Brainiac from the Silver Age DC Comics, but he does fit the appearance of the “real” Brainiac from Geoff Johns’s stories in the 2000s, the taller, yet very imposing version of the character. James Gunn loves himself some of the old-school Golden and Silver Age DC Comics, but he will likely go a little more serious with a character like Brainiac, especially since this is someone the fans have wanted to see for decades now in movies.

Brainiac was almost in Superman III, but it was deemed to be too cost-prohibitive for the film. He didn’t appear in a live-action role until Smallville, played by James Masters (Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and even then, it wasn’t really the Brainiac that fans were used to from the comics. There was a little more recognizable Brainiac in the Krypton television series, but this gives fans a chance to see a big-screen, big-budgeted version for the first time, and it is almost assured that James Gunn won’t let the fans down.

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