The end of the most recent trailer for Zack Snyder’s Batman V. Superman features a surprise appearance from an iconic DC Comics villain: Doomsday, the big monster guy covered in spikes who is most famous for that time he killed Superman in the ‘90s. He probably won’t be smashing the Man Of Steel into bloody bits in Batman V. Superman, but it does sound like this won’t be the last time we see his ugly face in one of Snyder’s comic book movies. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Snyder teased that his Justice League movie—the one coming after Batman V. Superman—will dig a little deeper into Doomsday. “He doesn’t just crawl out of the ground,” Snyder says. “He has his own mythology…so that has to be explored.”
The reference to “mythology” may come across like a specific nod to the comic books that these movies draw their inspiration from, but it’s actually a little more meaningless than that. The thing about Doomsday (at least in the comics) is that there’s really not a whole lot going on with him beyond the fact that he’s good at smashing stuff. Basically, he’s as boring as he is famous. That time he killed Superman is the only notable thing he ever did in the comics, and his backstory usually involves the existence of bad guys living on Krypton before it blew up, which is a thing that Man Of Steel already covered. In other words, there’s not a lot of mythology worth exploring, and it wouldn’t really make sense to explore what little there is.
That means Snyder could be planning to just make up some new backstory details for Doomsday, but there’s another possibility that arguably seems a little more likely: Maybe Snyder was just making stuff up when he said that thing. The Justice League movie is years away, and DC/Warner Bros. are still keeping a lot of details about Batman V. Superman secret (like how Aquaman gets involved), so it’s pretty surprising that the studios would be fine with Snyder admitting that future movies will take a deeper look at this disappointingly shallow villain. It’s impossible to know for sure either way, but the two possibilities are that Justice League will be about a villain whose backstory doesn’t make sense, or that Snyder is lying about the whole thing. We’ll let you decide which seems more likely.