As Ben Affleck once said as Batman, “We can rebuild. We can do better. We will. We have to.” And while he’ll get his chance to rebuild his interpretation of the character with this June’s The Flash, he once had the chance to expand on his own terms, with a standalone Batman movie all set up at Warner Bros. This, of course, was thrown down a well. Now, Affleck says it was his lack of confidence and direction that steered him away.
At SnyderCon this past weekend, Ben Affleck partook in a post-screening Q&A following Zack Snyder’s Justice League, letting the audience in on why he stepped away from his solo project. He said, in part, “There was a whole elaborate plan, which would take up too much time now, and some of which I may have forgotten. I always liked that character, and talked to Zack about that. My plan for continuing on in this character, a certain point I got to and kind of found that I thought I wasn’t really…I just felt like I wasn’t quite sure if it worked or jived. I felt like if you have a character like this, and you kind of take that on, you want to go forward, you better really be sure and understand it and be confident.” While Affleck is dancing around the topic here, he has also previously been open about his alcohol abuse during that time, another factor that halted his standalone movie.
Ben Affleck first played Batman in 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Even before this, the studio announced that he would be getting the aforementioned standalone movie, with additional directing and screenwriting duties. After he retreated to his own batcave, that made the way for Robert Pattinson–and a revival of Nirvana’s “Something in the Way.” Thankfully for those that enjoyed Affleck’s take on the Caped Crusader, he will be reprising it after all in this year’s The Flash, an experience he said was far better than that of Justice League’s: “It was a really nice way to revisit that as the prior experience had been difficult. This was really lovely. Really fun.” And while we’re happy his time on set this time around was a less stressful one, Affleck should know that for most people, the real Bat-draw will always be Michael Keaton…
Would you have liked to see a solo Ben Affleck Batman movie? Do you think he’d be able to pull it off? Let us know below!
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