Jesse Eisenberg has put a price on his Lex Luthor Razzie: studio parts. At a screen talk during the BFI London Film Festival on Sunday, October 18, the actor and filmmaker said the Worst Supporting Actor trophy he collected for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice left him unable to land roles in big studio pictures, and that fear of a sliding career is what sent him into writing and directing.
“I couldn’t get into movie studio parts anymore because I had won a Raspberry Award from [being in the] ‘Batman’ movie … and I saw the trajectory,” he told the London audience. The festival closed that night with his new film as director, The Debut.
A joke award, read as a verdict
The Golden Raspberry Awards are a parody ceremony. Co-founder John J. B. Wilson has said their intent is “to be funny.” Eisenberg heard something sharper in his win: an industry signal about where he did and did not belong.
“The industry did not want me to be in a superhero movie, and if you’re smart and self-aware, you learn that quickly.”
He called the Razzie “an award for bad acting” and argued that only “the unsuccessful actor” keeps chasing roles the business has rejected him for. Acting, as he described it, offers no resting point: “you are either on the treadmill and you’re doing okay and you’re running up or you are yesterday’s news and it’s awful.”
It is not the first time he has made the point. In December 2024, on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepard, he said the 2016 film’s reception “actually hurt my career in a real way.” He was careful then to blame himself rather than director Zack Snyder: “I loved my role, and I love the movie.”
The 2017 Razzie night in numbers
The 37th Razzies were announced on February 25, 2017. Batman v Superman went in with eight nominations, level with Zoolander 2 for the most that year, and came away with four wins:
- Worst Supporting Actor: Eisenberg, beating a field that included Johnny Depp, Nicolas Cage and Jared Leto’s Joker
- Worst Screen Combo: Ben Affleck and Henry Cavill
- Worst Screenplay: Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer
- Worst Remake, Rip-off or Sequel
None of that made the film a commercial failure. Against a listed budget of $250 million it took about $873 million worldwide, roughly 3.5 times its cost ($873 million divided by $250 million). That gap is part of why his account stands out: the movie made money, but the performance became the punchline.
What his filmography shows since
Checked against his credits, Eisenberg’s story holds up in broad strokes, with a few exceptions worth flagging. After 2017 his starring roles leaned toward smaller pictures: the tech drama The Hummingbird Project (2018), the dark comedy The Art of Self-Defense (2019) and the Marcel Marceau wartime drama Resistance (2020). Franchise work did not vanish, though it mostly meant returning to characters he already owned. He made Luthor cameos in post-credits scenes of Justice League (2017) and Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021), starred in Zombieland: Double Tap (2019) and came back for a third Now You See Me film in 2025.
The bigger change happened behind the camera. His first feature as director, When You Finish Saving the World, premiered at Sundance in 2022. He then wrote, directed and starred in A Real Pain (2024), which earned him the BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay and an Oscar nomination in that category, while co-star Kieran Culkin won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. He told the London crowd he began writing scripts “just to kind of keep my career afloat, really.” Measured by trophies, the backup plan has outperformed the original one.
He has also said no to one return the industry did want: playing Mark Zuckerberg again in Aaron Sorkin’s companion film The Social Reckoning. At the festival talk he offered only that it “is quite different.”
The Debut, a musical comedy starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti for which Eisenberg also wrote original music, is listed by distributor A24 for a theatrical release on December 11, 2026.
Further reading
Image: Harald Krichel, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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