A pretty reliable scooper shattered our hopes last week when he shot down the rumor Ben Affleck will suit up on HBO Max to finish his arc as Batman. However, the writer who pushed that initial story is standing by his claims.
Taylor Murphy at The Cultured Nerd wrote recently that Affleck signed a contract and will be back to adapt his script for the Max.
Heroic Hollywood’s Umberto Gonzalez tweeted out on the 7th that isn’t true.
Gonzalez wrote, “As much as I personally want to see this, unfortunately this is NOT true either.”
But Murphy appeared on the LightCast Podcast, “sticking to his guns,” and defended his claims and the legitimacy of his sources whom he says are members of his family that work at Warner Bros.
https://youtu.be/mGH-jWxv_rs
Murphy shared leaked images he received from them to back up what he says. They’re of the black Superman suit, the Shazam Family, Pokemon movie designs, and a picture of one of his family members at the DC offices. The Cultured Nerd logo covers the individual’s face to redact his identity.
Murphy believes his sources and claims he has multiple he will double-check with. They told him Affleck signed – “it happened.”
“Ben Affleck has reportedly signed a contract and we talked about how we had a couple other people, a couple of our sources, who said, ‘Hey, it happened, he signed,’ and we’re like, ‘Okay. Cool,’ and we’ll check with a few more people and then we checked with a couple more people, a couple prominent Instagram accounts,” he explained.
Murphy added “the conversation started” when he heard about Ben Affleck’s contract from a DC fan account moderator who heard about it from someone in special effects.
“One in particular, a buddy of mine, he runs one of those DC fan accounts that has a few hundred thousand followers on it,” Murphy said, “and he has some friends that work in special effects and then he texted me, he’s like, ‘Hey, my special effects buddy just told me that Ben signed a new contract. What the f’ is he talking about?’ That’s how the conversation started.”
He elaborated he checked with his source,”I’m like, ‘Dude, that is awesome because I heard the same thing from like three other people over here.’ So I started taking all these little confirmations, but eventually, I would like, you know what, I’ll just go f’n ask. I’ll just go to my source.”
He added, “I’ll call them up – like BAM – and I just called them and they told me, they’re like, ‘Sounds like you’ve already got your answer. What do you want me to tell you?'”
Related – Report: Ben Affleck To Appear in Justice League Sequel as Batman
Murphy discussed his lineage at Warner, starting with his great-aunt, who “worked on the Burbank lot as a project producer.” She retired weeks before The Dark Knight Rises hit theaters and was gifted a poster of “her as Catwoman on the Batpod blowing up the Warner Bros. Tower.”
He explained how WB runs in the family: “Warner Bros. has always been a family affair for us…I got to meet people who run the lot, like the curator of the DC vault, the Warner Bros vault. I got to meet people like that,” Murphy said. “I grew up meeting these people because of my aunt… I talk to them on a daily basis.”
One person he met was Batman producer Chuck Roven.
Murphy previously stated of Affleck’s comeback on LightCast that the actor signed a contract, the announcement will come before September at either DC FanDome or JusticeCon, and “Snyderverse Batman” is returning.
He says his family corroborates that info,”[They said,] ‘We can’t talk about something like that if it’s real, but it sounds like you’ve already got the information. I can’t stop you at that point, you’ve already got the information that you want even if I can’t tell you, yes or no, you got the information,’ and I was like, ‘Thanks’.”
DC FanDome is next month so chances are we will know who is right by this time in August.