Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor has a stinger scene in “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” and 2017’s “Justice League” alike. In the Snyder Cut, he sets Joe Mangianello’s Deathstroke loose on Batman, which would be cool if it wasn’t for the fact that at that point, it was becoming increasingly clear that Ben Affleck’s “Batman” movie wasn’t coming. As such, arguably the more interesting version of the scene is the 2017 one, in which Luthor proposes that he, Deathstroke, and others form a group to oppose the Justice League.
The alliance Luthor is teasing is, of course, the Legion of Doom — a villain squad that features some of the Justice Leaguers’ most prolific enemies. Based on the team members who have appeared in the DCEU, the lineup of the group might potentially have included names like Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), the Joker (Jared Leto), Black Adam (Dwayne Johnson), Cheetah (Kristen Wiig), and any number of as-yet unrevealed DC heavy hitters, from Brainiac to Captain Cold.
Of course, this never came to be. Luthor and Deathstroke went AWOL, the majority of the DCEU villains and antiheroes operated within the confines of their films, and the Suicide Squad hijacked the spotlight as the primary villain team-up. Still, a Zack Snyder fan might find it hard to think about this too much. After all, the lost possibility of the Justice League clashing against a flesh-and-blood team of their worst enemies instead of the CGI mess that is Steppenwolf (Ciarán Hinds) and his army might sting more than a little.
