We finally got some now-useless information on Ben Affleck’s Batman movie

It sounds like Ben Affleck's Batman could’ve been cool. Oh, well.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  August 3, 2023 | 8:26pm
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We finally got some now-useless information on Ben Affleck’s Batman movie
Photo: Hector Vivas (LatinContent via Getty Images)

Alternate timelines are commonplace in Hollywood. It’s probably why movies where a bunch of Spider-Mans talk to each other are popular. The sliding doors of show business can lead anyone to rest their heads in their hands, gaze toward the heavens, and wonder what could’ve been. Ah, time, if only there were enough of you to make every movie.

One film bound for the annals of the What-Could’ve-Been-iverse is Ben Affleck’s Batman movie. For a short time, Affleck’s caped crusader aimed to make some sense out of Zack Snyder’s DCEU. Alas, it was not meant to be. After Justice League, he was done. “Justice League, that was the nadir for me,” he said last year. “A confluence of things: my own life, my divorce, being away too much, the competing agendas, and then Zack’s personal tragedy, and the reshooting.”

“It just was the worst experience. It was awful. It was everything that I didn’t like about this. That became the moment where I said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’”

While we’re happy that Mr. Affleck has since bounced back—he has since married Jennifer Lopez—we’d still like to know more about Batman. Earlier this year, Affleck confirmed that Joe Manganiello’s Deathstroke would’ve been the villain. “I was at the time really trying to hone in and focus on that character and get into depth and detail about it to make him seem as impressive as I felt there was the opportunity to do.”

More recently, though, Jay Oliva, a storyboard artist who worked on numerous DCEU movies, gave the world more information and an opinion: “It was the best. It was amazing.” Speaking to Inverse, Oliva whets the fandom’s appetites with a dish we’ll never get to taste. Oliva said he saw what he believes to be the second draft of the script and that Affleck’s approach was all-encompassing.

“I’ve worked on a lot of Batman things, and what was really cool about it was it was tying together a lot of really cool Batman storylines that had never been really explored,” he said. “Ben’s story was gonna cover something that had never really been covered in comics but was building off of storylines in the Batman mythos over the last 80 years and approaching it from a new kind of perspective.”

Maybe, one day, that script will make its way into a comic book, but for now, we’ll have to suffice for Oliva’s opinion.

“It was very clever, and there were a lot of things about it that I really loved that I wish that had come to fruition,” he said. “It was a really great project in the beginning. Ben had to step away for personal reasons, and I totally understood, but the time that I spent with Ben working on the project was fantastic.”

“Maybe someday I can spill the beans,” he adds, “but I still can’t talk about it.”

We await the day, Mr. Oliva.

 
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