Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the first big blockbuster of 2016, opens this Easter weekend, and a giant, sustained promotional push seems to guarantee that it will clean up at the box office. Having successfully revived the Superman franchise with Man of Steel (2013), director Zack Snyder turns his attention to the more recent superhero conflict between Superman and Batman. I have a big problem with movies that fictionalize actual events, because inevitably things are distorted to make them more dramatic. So earlier this year, as ads for the movie began to appear, I decided to get the real story by landing an interview with billionaire investor Bruce Wayne, who rarely speaks to the press and whose long career as a nocturnal crime fighter is well documented on film.
Look, I don’t have any antipathy for him. He’s the one who’s telling lies about me. He’s all over the airwaves saying that I’ve turned Gotham City into a surveillance society, that I consider myself the law, all these things. What we have in Gotham is a system, a really great system, where people can plug into our network and provide information about suspicious activities in their neighborhood, and we can target dangerous behavior and increase people’s security. It’s completely legal and completely voluntary and it works great. People are out of their minds with how great this thing is. So Superman is just plain lying. And you know, I’ve always been perfectly nice to him. But he’s a liar, and if you people in the press were doing your job, you’d be exposing his lies instead of cooperating with what is really just complete character assassination.
Lane has written that your longtime bachelor status is linked to your crime fighting, that you have a need to punish people because of your own traumatic past and this makes you generally hostile to women.
