Special:Badtitle/NS90:User talk:DocColress/The Great Big Examples Suggestion Topic 3: Snake Eater/reply (14)

(I disagree that Man of Steel is a good movie, let alone a good Superman movie, let alone a good comic book movie, but that's just my opinion.)

We have to consider that, despite being played by a different actor, this is the same version as the Hackman one. And really, even with the campier tone of Hackman's rendition, he was easily more heinous than Zod and his cohorts. Think about that for a sec: a crazed and intelligent but otherwise regular human being was more heinous than three superpowered Kryptonian criminals. Zod wasn't necessarily "genocidal" since he seemed more content with enslaving humanity than destroying it: he just had no qualms about killing a few earthlings when he felt he had to. Otherwise, he had no specific body count in mind, and the one he most wanted to kill was Superman himself. Luthor, on the other hand, deliberately threatened to kill a lot of people so that he could benefit from the aftermath of all the death and destruction twice - with the plan in Superman Returns having a higher body count that Luthor flat out acknowledged without caring. So basically, not only would his sillier portrayal of the earlier films not hurt his chances, they'd do the opposite. When Zod, the seemingly more "serious" villain and threat, fails to be as heinous as the more comedic Luthor, that means that the heinous standard was set in Luthor's favor even before he got Darker and Edgier in Superman Returns.

As for not being a Bad Boss - not as much as some others might be, but still...aside from putting Kitty's life in danger without her knowing he'd actually do that, this guy was going to kill Miss Tesmacher's mother without giving a damn, left Otis (whom he insulted regularly) behind in prison, abandoned Tesmacher again at some point off-screen, didn't seem to give a damn that his henchman got crushed to death by a mass of Kryptonite, and flat out told Kitty he'd trade "every ounce of her blood" for a quart of gasoline! And the "punchline" in his last scene was that he was contemplating eating Kitty's pet dog, too! So he has absolutely zero good relationships with anyone in the films. (We'e not counting his nephew in Superman IV because that film got Retconned out of canon.)

Overall, you're correct: outside of some comic depictions, the Hackman/Spacey Lex Luthor is the most monstrous media depiction of the character. He's an easy keeper.