In less than six months Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice will finally hit theaters, and Warner Bros. has officially started to roll out their viral marketing campaign for the film. A new article sheds some light on the background of the DC Extended Universe’s Lex Luthor, the movie’s central villain, played by Jesse Eisenberg.

Fortune magazine is running a feature profiling the company’s CEO, Lex Luthor Jr. That’s right, Junior — the Man of Steel’s #1 nemesis isn’t the first to bear the name Lex Luthor in this version of the story, nor did he build his company LexCorp from the ground up, as he did in most versions of the comic mythos.

From what little we’ve seen of the movie’s version of Lex, he seems to be a young tech genius, a kind of Mark Zuckerberg gone to the dark side. And while that still seems to be the case, the new Fortune “article” on Lex shows that he actually inherited his father’s aging petrochemical and heavy machinery company and turned it into a tech company, making Lex Luthor the Second the darling of Silicon Valley, and a billionaire at the age of 31. This is also a bit like the Smallville version of Lex, who also inherited his father’s company, although in that show his dear ol’ dad was named Lionel Luthor.

The Fortune article also drops several hints about what to expect from this version of Lex, like the fact that his company LexCorp is described as one of the “top three charitable corporations in America, just after Kord Industries and Wayne Enterprises. Of course, we knew Wayne Industries would figure into this movie, but the comment about Kord Industries also confirms that billionaire inventor Ted Kord is also part of the movie universe, which means that his superhero identity of Blue Beetle probably is too. (Maybe those rumors of a Blue Beetle/Booster Gold movie set in the DC movie universe aren’t so far fetched now are they?)

Also in the article, Lex throws a little shade at Bruce Wayne and Ted Kord, saying, “I can’t hold a candle to those guys in the debauched billionaire playboy department!” Another big difference between Lex and Bruce Wayne revealed in the article: Luthor is willing to get into the weapons business, despite being called a “war monger” for it by some. There are other hints about what Luthor has up his sleeve, including hints about Lex’s “meteorite collection.” Want to bet some of those meteorites are of the green and Kryptonian variety?

You can check out the whole Fortune article on Lex at the link below, and expect a lot more Batman v Superman viral marketing to start hitting before the holidays.

—

HT: Fortune

IMAGE: Warner Bros.