Love it or hate it, Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice is a fun movie to take a poke at, and by now just about everyone’s had a go, from the unofficial stars of YouTube to the veterans of late-night comedy. Some of the jabs were put together well before the movie came out, while others were quick responses to the early released footage, so spoilers are definitely light here. If you like to laugh and enjoy films in general, we think there’s sure to be something here that’ll make you smile. And really, laughter is what brings people together. Well, that and having mothers with coincidentally identical first names.
Here are the 12 Best Batman V Superman Spoofs.
12. Batman v Superman 1966
The idea’s simple enough. What if, instead of the drab, greying Nolan/Snyder visions of Superman and Batman, the movie featured a fight between the stars of children’s live-action shows of the 1950s and 1960s? There’s not much more to it than that and the footage isn’t edited well enough to really convince us that Superman and Batman are in the same place, but it’s still kinda fun to watch George Reeves in one shot and Adam West in the next and put the story together for ourselves as best we can (especially when the stand-ins for Doomsday and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman show up).
For what it’s worth, the 1960s comics were as campy as anything on the small screen, and their versions of Superman and Batman were best buddies who still fought all the time, usually because someone else had tricked them into it and they weren’t too bright. The more things change…
11. Batman v Superman: XXX
Nothing lowers people’s expectations faster than the words “porn parody” or “to quote an anonymous YouTube commenter,” but Axel Braun surprised the masses by bringing some actual production values and something resembling a plot to his latest epic (which has a safe-for-work trailer at this link).
Several of the characters, such as Luthor and Harley Quinn, look truer to their best-known selves here than in anything you’ll find in a DC Comics film this year. And if you’d rather watch Superman and Batman sex up each other, then Men.com has you covered there, too.
10. Weird Trailer
If you thought Zack Snyder’s directing style was disorienting, just imagine a whole movie directed like this. Weird Trailers are always something of a hallucinatory experience, but this one seems more “literal” than most, with visual riffs on everything from Affleck’s half-smirk when he’s asked about “this vigilante in Gotham City” to the message the Joker left spray-painted on Robin’s costume to the “lemonade” bit from Senator Finch’s verbal jousting match with Lex Luthor (which the movie turned into a grim punchline of its own).
But every time you think you’re starting to get your bearings, Aldo Jones hits you with another twist, just because he feels like it. Joke’s on you, viewer. Ha ha ha.
9. Batman v Superman: The Final Squabble
There’s not a lot to say here that wouldn’t spoil the joke. Conan O’Brien, whose credentials as a comic nerd need no proving at this point, released this “teaser trailer” late last year. It managed to find an angle on the conflict that no one else (to our knowledge) had taken, even though the name of the movie really should have pushed more people’s thinking in that particular direction.
Actually, considering how much brooding and talking Superman and Batman do before they get down to the actual fighting, this “trailer” could have been more prescient than anybody thought.
8. Batfleck vs. Superfleck
If you’re going to monkey with the Batman v Superman trailer, then one easy fix is to change who Batman’s fighting. There are versions where he’s going up against Santa Claus or Donald Trump (on his fifth term, which seems like a pretty long time for Batman to have been waiting around before deciding to take action, but whatever).
Still, there’s nothing quite like pitting the Ben Affleck Batman against the Ben Affleck Superman, taken from the 2006 movie Hollywoodland. Okay, Affleck is actually playing George Reeves, the actor of the 1950s who played Superman until his mysterious death, but that’s close enough for some borrowed footage.
7. The Simplest Solution to Batman v Superman
After the movie was announced, but well before any trailers came out, Andy Kluthe and Andrew Bridgman came up with this nine-panel resolution to the conflict, which gives one of the parties a clear victory and hearkens back to the earliest days of DC Comics filmmaking. It’s hard to say just why the loser of the fight has such a look of dread in the final panel, but he seems to know, somehow, that something has been lost, some way.
Dorkly, naturally, has a lot of comedy at BvS’s expense and even has some other Batman-Superman fights that go in the other direction, but nothing quite beats this approach for its Zen simplicity.
6. Batman and Superman v Bridget Jones
Some extremely clever editing elevates this trailer mashup over most of its breed (though it certainly helps that it’s produced by Jimmy Kimmel, who’s about to show up again on this list). Bridget Jones’ Baby won’t be coming out until September of this year, but the character is familiar enough from earlier movies, and the trailer dropped around the time BvS hit theaters.
It’s a nifty coincidence that both movies’ trailers use a certain two-word, thirteen-letter phrase, and its repetition is the highlight of the short, but there’s also fun to be had in its last spoken line, which gives a whole new meaning to Ben Affleck’s aforementioned half-smirk.
5. Jimmy Kimmel’s Guest Appearance
Kimmel manages to unite the warring heroes against him in a scene purported to be “cut” from the movie, another version of Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent’s awkward party talk. In fact, it’s so much like the party scene at first that it seems like he’s just edited into existing footage, but Kimmel is just that drunk guy at a party who will not be ignored and it isn’t long before his observations start derailing the plot.
With special guest appearances by Jesse Eisenberg (whose approach to Lex Luthor fits this scene to a tee), Will Arnett as Lego Batman, and… one other actor you’re likely to recognize, who goes way back with one of the BvS stars.
4. Bat Blood
Reimagining Batman as Taylor Swift is pretty boss all by itself, but this video is also a celebration of ten years of How It Should Have Ended, the cartoon series that figures out new, funny, and often more sensible endings (and sometimes beginnings and middles) for well-known movies.
To spoof the original video’s extensive cast, HISHE plumbed its own archives of videos (also aping the video’s wry character-naming conventions). HISHE has been sort of leading up to a Batman-Superman conflict for most of that decade-long run, with a running gag of the two heroes just barely muzzling their egos to relax and talk shop at a coffee house.
3. Batlexander Manilton
This is a quality production from start to finish, with well-composed lyrics, simple but effective choreography, and a strong focus on Batman, which doesn’t seem like it should work nearly as well as it does. While the Bat Blood mashup was a pretty natural fit in retrospect, Alexander Hamilton’s life and times have a bit less in common with Bruce Wayne’s, though they are both notorious, at least right now, for an ill-advised duel to the death.
Batlexander Manilton drops the tiniest reference to that duel at the last minute, with Clark Kent coming onstage as “the fool who fought him.” Alexander Lutherton seems like a closer match, but it’s probably for the best that nobody pursued that one.
2. The Real Reasons Batman and Superman Hate Each Other
Let’s be honest: MAD Magazine is a long way away from its heyday as the vanguard of American satire in the 1950s. But it can still knock one out of the park every now and then, and this comedy list (from #538) is the best humorous treatment of their rivalry itself that we’ve seen, with choice lines like “Sure, he has super-hearing. But does he super-listen?” (a complaint Lois Lane has also probably muttered to herself a time or two) and “It takes him at least thirty minutes after every battle to pick all his Batarangs up off the ground.”
The only problem with this spread is the choice to use two colors of lettering for the captions, which makes it a little confusing whose complaints are whose (Batman’s are to the left, Superman’s to the right).
1. Sadfleck
Okay, it’s not a parody of anything in the film per se, but this simple edit of Ben Affleck’s reaction to the movie’s unkind reviews is not to be missed. There are several versions floating around, but it plays better without a laugh track or any other additions beyond that Simon and Garfunkel tune.
(Hey, don’t feel too bad for Affleck. Not only is surprisingly little blame falling on his shoulders, but he’s getting his very own Batman movie as a follow-up, and is likely to direct it, which is more of an opportunity for a do-over than most actors get when they fail to wow the critics.)
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These are the best we can think of, but as Snyder reminds us, even the most perfect of men and Kryptonians can overlook things. Hit us up with your own suggestions in the comments!
