Last week the Justice League hype machine spun into a new gear, with not just a trailer released but also a teaser for the trailer and a long sequence of close-up snapshots, including one extremely questionable one of Wonder Woman apparently using the bathroom. The trailer itself features the familiar dark blue hues and hyper-processed machismo of a Zach Snyder project, but foregrounded one-liners and some post-Suicide Squad classic rock rather than the dour musings on mortality and the pompous strings of the director’s Superman movies. It all seemed, well, pretty fun, actually!
Also viewing the trailer this weekend were The Avengers, at least as envisioned in this mashup by DrMachakil, and, after spending most of the preview’s runtime forlornly side-eyeing each other and gazing with dismay, they convene to talk shop about their job prospects in a post-Justice League universe. To be fair, they seem a little more down on themselves than they need to—the Marvel movies are a juggernaut rolling on with a good head of steam, whereas these DC characters are sort of playing catch-up.
Still, it raises the tantalizing but impossible vision of a movie pitting all of these characters against one another in a glorious clusterfuck of brand synergy, product placement, guest stars, and franchise-building, in which Ben Affleck’s Batman squares off against Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, and, hell, they’d probably find a way to throw in an X-Man or two and maybe a Skywalker or something, because why not. Such a film will not ever be produced, but mashup makers on the internet will probably eventually be able to supercut them all into a coherent single narrative, because that is how these things work.
You can watch the original trailer below, in case, for some reason, you don’t want to see Jeremy Renner’s reaction to it.