Wherever you rank Ben Affleck on the listing of live-action Batman actors, there’s no query he performed DC Comics’ Caped Crusader longer than most. His model of Bruce Wayne debuted in Batman v Superman: Daybreak of Justice, then returned for a cameo in Suicide Squad, each cuts of Justice League, and eventually The Flash. Affleck lately mirrored on enjoying Batman within the DC Prolonged Universe, and that included sharing the epiphany he had that made him go, “Oh shit.”
Right this moment marks the nine-year anniversary of Batman v Superman: Daybreak of Justice’s launch, which makes for good timing with the publication of Affleck’s new interview with GQ. When the actor was requested if he had “a coherent thought or postmortem” about his time enjoying Batman, he began off saying:
I had a extremely good time. I liked doing the Batman film. I liked Batman v Superman. And I appreciated my temporary stints on The Flash that I did and after I started working with Viola Davis on Suicide Squad for a day or two. By way of creatively, I actually assume that I like the thought and the ambition that I had for it, which was of the kind of older, damaged, broken Bruce Wayne. And it was one thing we actually went for within the first film.
Ben Affleck’s first outing as Batman got here 4 years after the discharge of The Darkish Knight Rises, the concluding chapter of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy that noticed Christian Bale carrying the cape and cowl. As Affleck talked about, one of many methods his Batman stood out from those earlier than is that he’d been combating crime for properly over twenty years. He’d been pummeling criminals in Gotham Metropolis again when Clark Kent, performed as an grownup by Henry Cavill, was roughly a preteen across the time he was discovering his Kryptonian powers.
Which, in fact, leads into the opposite massive factor that distinguished Ben Affleck’s Batman: he was the primary to stay in a shared universe populated by different DC Comics superheroes, together with Superman, Marvel Girl, Aquaman, Flash and Cyborg. Nonetheless, wanting again on this portion of his profession, Affleck realized that particular issues began to emerge relating to the tone of the DCEU motion pictures he appeared in. In his phrases:
However what occurred was it began to skew too previous for an enormous a part of the viewers. Like even my very own son on the time was too scared to look at the film. And so after I noticed that I used to be like, ‘Oh shit, we’ve an issue.’ Then I believe that’s if you had a filmmaker that needed to proceed down that highway and a studio that needed to recapture all of the youthful viewers at cross functions. Then you’ve two entities, two individuals actually desirous to do one thing totally different and that may be a actually unhealthy recipe.
He’s being imprecise, but it surely’s affordable to deduce the “skew too previous” half is in reference to the depth of Batman v Superman: Daybreak of Justice, to the purpose that its Final Version was rated R. Zack Snyder’s Justice League had the same tone that the general public lastly acquired to see when it was made out there to stream with a Max subscription, however the theatrical lower helmed by Joss Whedon undoubtedly had a lighter really feel to it. The clashing of artistic visions simply doesn’t work in the long term, and I’ll go as far as to say it performed an enormous position within the DCEU finally collapsing.
Nonetheless, for probably the most half, Ben Affleck had a optimistic expertise bringing Batman to life, and possibly there’ll come a day when he might reprise the position equally to what Michael Keaton did in The Flash. For now, Affleck’s successor, Robert Pattinson, will return to position in 2027’s The Batman: Half II. Moreover, the brand new DC Universe continuity can have its personal Batman who will star in The Courageous and the Daring.