Kevin Smith moderated a chat with Zack Snyder over the weekend to promote the blu-ray release of Man of Steel, and while there wasn’t a lot of big overt news about the film, a couple of small things did end up online. One was in the fan Q&A itself, in which Snyder dropped a small reference to Lex Luthor, in a way that suggests Luthor will be in Batman vs. Superman.

And then Smith, on one of his own podcasts, said that he’s seen the new Batsuit, and promises that it represents a new direction for Batman on film.

First up, Luthor. We’ve seen those minor nods to LexCorp that were painted into Man of Steel, leading to the assumption that Luthor would make an appearance of some sort in the next film. Snyder said in the online event, “At its core, Superman is an alien. He comes from an alien world … Lex loves to call him an alien.”

That could be just a general note to illustrate the particulars of Luthor’s character without being too specific to the new film, but Snyder’s facial expression seemed to indicate more.

Smith, meanwhile, said on his podcast Hollywood Babble-On [via Nerdbastards] that Snyder did show him a photo of Ben Affleck in the new Batman suit. Smith enthused,

I saw the costume, more than that I saw him [Ben Affleck] in the costume…I don’t want to give anything away cause that is up to them and stuff, but I am going to say this…I instantly bear hugged him. You have not seen this costume in a movie, on film before. For a comb book fan, it was mind-bending… Because every other movie has done this matrixy black armor thing…There wasn’t a single nipple on this fucking suit man… I think everyone is just gonna be like ‘Holy Shit!’ It’s its own thing, man. We haven’t been down this path before…. There’s a very [beep]-influence to it, I would say.

That [beep] was done by Smith — the show’s live audience got to hear it, but the online audience does not — so make your guesses as to what he was referring to.

The header image above, incidentally, is part of one of three images that Zack Snyder commissioned for the charity We Can Be Heroes, which were also debuted on the fan Q&A event and are on eBay now. The one we used is from “We Could Have Changed the World” by Jonathan Wayshak.