14 DAY TRIAL // The big villain in Warner Bros.’ 2013 release “Man of Steel,” the Superman reboot, was General Zod, played to perfection by the insanely talented and occasionally scary Michael Shannon. If you watch the trailer for next year’s “Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice” below, you will catch a glimpse of him in a body bag, as someone is zipping it up.
This blink-and-you-missed-it cameo sparked massive debates among fans and movie critics online, with the most popular theory being that new villain Lex Luthor will probably use technology to bring Zod back to life, perhaps as Doomsday.
Shannon pretty much dug himself into a hole when he joked about his cameo, not aware of the already existing hype around it.
Michael Shannon backtracks, says there will be no Zod in new film
In a new interview with The Daily Beast, Shannon is trying to get himself out of the hole, and the best way to do that is to backtrack on the comments. They were obviously a joke and he never imagined that his answer would go viral, especially since he’d gone to some lengths to make it as ridiculous as possible.
He’s right about that: it was ridiculous. A couple of weeks ago, Vulture asked him if Zod will appear in “Batman V. Superman,” and he replied in the positive, saying he’d already been on set shooting. His costume will be different, though, he added: this time, he had fins and he might even turn into a Porsche.
Fans chose to ignore the ridiculousness of that last part and to interpret his answer as an attempt to let them in on the good news without actually going on the record as spilling the beans.
Shannon is slightly amused how they came to this conclusion and how quickly things escalated online.
Zod will make an appearance, though
So, what about the shot of Zod in the body bag? For context, we should add that the story in “Batman V. Superman” takes place right after the events in “Man of Steel,” at the end of which fans saw Superman snap Zod’s neck. It was the first time ever in the history of the character when he killed someone.
Well, Shannon says that there will be some Zod in the film, but not in the way the fans like to believe there’ll be.
“I wasn’t there. It’s a really awkward situation - I’m in the trailer for a movie that I didn’t work on,” Shannon says. “The thing about the whole Krypton universe, apparently, is that even when you destroy them, there are ghosts. The first [film], Jor-El is there even though he’s been dead for lord knows how long.”
He was called on set to do some voiceover for “that ghost thing” but didn’t get back in Zod’s suit, the actor stresses. That obviously doesn’t explain why he appears in the full suit, lying dead in the body bag: he obviously got in costume to shoot that scene.
It sure sounds like Warner Bros. got on the phone and told Shannon to fix the damage that he caused with his joke. In other words, it’s likely that he revealed Zod’s future in the franchise by making that ridiculous joke with the fins, because it made it clear that he’d been on the set.
