A Calm, Sensible Reaction to Jesse Eisenberg as Lex Luthor

Jesse Eisenberg is Lex Luthor, because Michael Cera is already booked.

I'm sure that's the kind of reaction that DC was expecting and I'm all too happy to give it to them.  And it's not even because I'm angry about the casting. I actually kinda like it.  I, unlike so many others, have perspective.  The perspective that comes from an reading too many comic books.  I understand that there are many different versions of Lex Luthor, and that Jesse Eisenberg fits into a few of them.  Dare I say, this casting is brave...and bold.  Please, hold your applause, because that joke was awful.

Still, you're gonna have to go through the initial shock of people saying, "The fucking dude that played Mark Zuckerberg is gonna be Lex Luthor?"

I saw a guy on Facebook that said, "Is he going to invent Facebook to defeat Superman?"  Really, that's the level of discourse DC has to face, and it's not like Jesse Eisenberg has given the fans a ton of ammo to throw back at him.  This won't go much past unfunny Facebook jokes and DC will be fine with that, because they already weathered the worst of this storm with Ben Affleck.  That was an epic tantrum, and once we got past that, it's like people couldn't really get that mad anymore.  It was like the world said, "Okay, we all know this flick is gonna suck. They really can't do any worse than this." 

And after that, Gal Gadot just got questions about her physique, mostly because no one knows who she is.  Jesse Eisenberg is just getting bad jokes, like the ones I've written just now.  It's all just been diminishing nerdrage, so we'll probably be done with this story by Monday.  No one even noticed that Jeremy Irons is playing Alfred.

I saw more outrage yesterday that Fox wants Channing Tatum to play Gambit in a future X-Men movie.  It wouldn't be a surprise that Fox was thinking about doing some more bad X-Men casting, but people were legit mad at that, I guess because Channing Tatum is too sexy or can't act or something.  As if Gambit is a character filled with such pathos that only a Shakespearean actor could capture it all.  Anyway, the X-Men flicks are filled with terrible decisions. I still believe that Halle Berry was cast because she was the only black person the producers could name.

Warner Bros. is supposed to be better than that.  Or at least Christopher Nolan is and Zach Snyder are.  And I'm willing to give it a chance, because as I've said trying to talk people off the ledge today, it all depends on what kind of Lex Luthor will be in the movie.  You got your "evil businessman" Lex Luthor (who could stomp ass), and you got your "sociopath scientist" Lex Luthor (who could not).  I think the second one is something Eisenberg can work with.  As long as he's not on there talking about being the "greatest criminal mind of our time," I think we'll be fine.