For as long as the two characters have existed, superhero fans have dreamed about what it would finally be like to see Batman fight Superman on film. While it had been done multiple times on the comics page and in the animated realm, that never quite quenched the thirst of those who desperately wanted to see the Dark Knight and the Man of Steel engage in some live-action, big screen fisticuffs. Last year, the main event title fight finally happened, in the form of Zack Snyder's Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.
While reactions to the film were memorably divisive, it can't be argued that Snyder's effort wasn't at least a huge financial success, earning nearly $900 million worldwide on a budget of $250 million. It's also hard to argue that BVS wasn't a very visually impressive movie, full of top-notch visual effects sequences and eye-catching action scenes. As has been made evident multiple times before though, what audiences saw in the final cut was far from the first draft, a fact reinforced by the large amount of concept art for the film that has surfaced online since its release.
Despite being nearly an entire year removed from BVS' March 2016 release date, the concept art keeps coming, this time courtesy of the Moving Picture Company and its artist Sean Ray. As first revealed by ComicBook, the art shines a spotlight on early designs for both Gotham City and powerful rampaging villain Doomsday. Check them out in the gallery below:
[vn_gallery name="Batman V Superman: Doomsday & Gotham City Concept Art" id="901177"]
As was well-documented at the time, many DC fans took umbrage with the revised origin story for Doomsday presented in BVS, transforming the character from an alien threat into a creature created from a biological combination of General Zod's corpse and Lex Luther's blood. New origin or not though, Doosmday still proved formidable, ultimately forcing Superman to sacrifice his own life in order to defeat the monster.
BVS also presented fans with the DCEU's first look at Gotham City on film since Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight trilogy. Here's how MPC explains their approach to the task of designing Batman's home city:
"One of MPC’s largest tasks was to create a digital Gotham City. Creating this vast and complex environment required months of planning and detailed mapping. The beauty and challenge of urban development is that every city is the product of decades of development and progress. To ensure the city felt realistically developed through time, the team decided to recreate and combine large sections of existing selected city sections and adapt the architecture and layout to fit Gotham’s. Thousands of photographs were put through MPC’s photogrammetry pipeline to create geometry and textures for each city section. This technique ensured that each building and street was completely unique which was made possible to render by MPC’s latest renderer update."
With both BVS and Suicide Squad now in the books, the DCEU's next stop is this summer's hotly-anticipated Wonder Woman solo-film. Then, this fall sees the debut of the DCEU equivalent to The Avengers, Zack Snyder's Justice League. It's going to be a huge year for DC on film, and it's sure to be a hell of a ride.
Source: ComicBook
