Everyone is currently so excited about Justice League’s Snyder Cut being released that the director’s other efforts are being overlooked, but in a recent watch party of the DCEU progenitor Man of Steel, Snyder revealed an Easter Egg that set up the appearance of Doomsday in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice.
During the film’s opening sequence on Krypton, a shattered moon can be seen hanging in the sky, which Snyder declared foreshadowed the CGI abomination.
“Notice up there is the broken moon. In the comic book lore that moon was broken a long time ago by Doomsday. So this Doomsday concept I wanted to plant early. That Doomsday is a thing that could exist, that could be brought into the universe, because I really like that character. From the beginning I thought it would be cool to have Doomsday involved somehow in the movies.”
The creation of the moon-destroying Doomsday is likely what Lex Luthor was referencing before creating his own by mutating the corpse of Zod, stating that the act had been performed once before by the Kryptonian Council, an experiment with such potentially apocalyptic results that it was banned from being recreated. It also follows that the creature might still be alive, perhaps imprisoned in a manner similar to that seen at the beginning of The Death of Superman comic arc.
Despite what Snyder states, there isn’t actually any comic book precedent of Krypton’s moon being destroyed by Doomsday – although please correct me if I’m wrong – but the notion of a force so destructive it can smash a celestial body into fragments certainly fits with the bombastic overkill of his directorial style, and was evidently intended to make audiences question exactly what could have caused it.
Tangentially, in the TV series Krypton, which was co-created by Man of Steel screenwriter David S. Goyer, a season 2 episode involves the moon Wethgor being destroyed in an attempt to put an end to the rampage of Doomsday and kill the seemingly indestructible monstrosity. In the comics themselves, that same moon was destroyed along with an inhabited colony by supervillain Jax-Ur, resulting in his imprisonment in the Phantom Zone from where he periodically escapes and battles Superman.
Say what you like about Snyder’s lack of subtlety, but he certainly pays attention to visuals, and perhaps in the run up to the release of his original vision of Justice League, more details will be revealed about Man of Steel that puts the past in a new light and provides clues as to what we might see in the future.