Former Batman Ben Affleck Is Not Returning To DC Or Superhero Movies After His ‘Justice League’ Experiences: “I’ve Lost Interest”
Anyone still holding out hope for the restoration of the Snyderverse is going to be disappointed. Ben Affleck was a key component to that extended universe as its jaded, grizzled Batman, but if it does come back, it’ll have to do without him.
While promoting his next movie, The Accountant 2, in a GQ interview, Affleck rehashed his experience working on Justice League with Zack Snyder’s replacement Joss Whedon. The long and short of it is he doesn’t want to repeat that ordeal.
Explained Affleck, “There are a number of reasons why that was a really excruciating experience. And they don’t all have to do with the simple dynamic of, say, being in a superhero movie or whatever. I am not interested in going down that particular genre again, not because of that bad experience, but just: I’ve lost interest in what was of interest about it to me.”
He continued, “But I certainly wouldn’t want to replicate an experience like that. A lot of it was misalignment of agendas, understandings, expectations. And also by the way, I wasn’t bringing anything particularly wonderful to that equation at the time, either. I had my own failings, significant failings, in that process and at that time.”
Overall, he liked playing Batman initially and when he could do cameos toward the end. “I had a really good time. I loved doing the Batman movie. I loved Batman v Superman. And I liked my brief stints on The Flash that I did and when I got to work with Viola Davis on Suicide Squad for a day or two,” Affleck said.
“In terms of creatively, I really think that I like the idea and the ambition that I had for it, which was of the sort of older, broken, damaged Bruce Wayne. And it was something we really went for in the first movie,” he added.
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Affleck stated before that he was having fun as Batman again in The Flash. He even wondered if he could go back to the set and shoot more footage as he was slipping into the character in a way that satisfied him. There was a chance of going further, but The Flash was recut, and the DCEU was killed by James Gunn and David Zaslav’s reboot.
Even before that, the actor had concerns that Snyder’s vision was skewing “too old” and alienating children, including his. “But what happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience. Like even my own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie. And so when I saw that I was like, ‘Oh shit, we have a problem,’” Affleck recalled.
“Then I think that’s when you had a filmmaker that wanted to continue down that road and a studio that wanted to recapture all the younger audience at cross purposes. Then you have two entities, two people really wanting to do something different and that is a really bad recipe,” he observed.
Batman by himself has enough competing visions. Affleck embarked on a solo movie he wanted to direct from a script he notoriously could not “crack.” Matt Reeves stepped in and eventually went in a different direction sans Affleck, which stuck with dark, gritty, and adult.
That saga has been the status quo for The Dark Knight ever since, but though it’s expanding with The Penguin, we’re still waiting on The Batman 2.
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