Last night on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, new Batman Ben Affleck appeared to plug DC Comics’ latest trailer for Batman v Superman.
Beyond the Kimmel vs. Affleck shenanigans (Kimmel kept calling him Batman, but eventually conceded to calling him Bruce Wayne instead), the first five seconds of the latest trailer shows Affleckman driving a late-Fifties Aston Martin DB2/4 MKIII. Is the car too downmarket for billionaire Wayne? A good one will set you back a mere $500,000 on the auction market.
As for the rest of the vehicles in the comic-book thriller, halfway through the trailer we see a murdered-out Jeep Renegade (both Chrysler and GM have been involved in the film, which was largely shot in Michigan), a brief clip of Batman’s plane and, of course, the Batmobile.
The latter is made of carbon fiber, gets a nose-mounted machine gun and is rumored to be built on a GM truck chassis. (It’s running 50-inch rubber and is 20 feet long and 12 feet wide, so…) The entire movie machine is built on a hydraulic chassis that can lift up to become more hulking.
If anything, the vehicle mirrors the trend in Batmobiles since the Sixties—when the vehicles were sleek and swanky. Production designer Patrick Tatopoulos was quoted this summer by ontheflix.com saying he wanted to build a sexy-looking tank. We’re not sure that’s what was achieved here. Tank, yes. Sexy? Um, we’ll take the Aston instead, thanks.
Not to be outdone by the Star Wars juggernaut, let alone rival Marvel’s marketing machine, DC has teamed with Hot Wheels on nine different cars “themed” around the movie. Yes, there are three hot rods for the Dark Knight alone, Wonder Woman and the Joker get their own garageful and, strangest of all, Superman has a car. The dude can fly. So he needs a car because?
At least the life-size Hot Wheels Superbatmanmobile that was revealed at Comic-Con this past summer pays tribute to to a classic 1969 Mattel classic, the Twin Mill, which has dual 750-horsepower V8s. If Clark Kent has to get stuck in Gotham gridlock, it might as well be in this thing.