Ben Affleck's Unmade Batman Movie Would've Tied Together 80 Years Of Unexplored Stories
The long and winding path leading to the live-action DC Universe, which still remains in flux as the new leadership of James Gunn and Peter Safran tries to reshape the franchise into their own vision, has been delineated by the movies that were made and released just as much as the various projects that ultimately never saw daylight. And there has been a lot of them, as one look at Warner Bros.' original slate for their superhero franchise makes painfully clear.
But of all the unmade movies to keep DC diehards awake at night in the years since, one of them continues to haunt fans more than any other: the "Batman" film that would've starred and been directed and co-written by Ben Affleck. Unfortunately, this fell apart for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which had to do with the actor setting aside time to focus on his personal life after such an unpleasant experience filming "Justice League."
Even all these years later, however, we've yet to fully escape the shadow cast by what that movie could've been.
The latest update on this unmade production comes courtesy of storyboard artist, animation director, and creative consultant Jay Oliva. In an interview with Inverse, the longtime DC veteran took a trip down memory lane and spoke up about the plan for Affleck's "Batman" movie. He's quick to admit that he's unable to go into specific plot details, remarking, "I can't really say too much other than it was f***ing awesome. It was the best. It was amazing." But his consulting work on the film put him in a unique position to appreciate what Affleck and comic writer and one-time DC executive Geoff Johns would've done. According to Oliva, it would've explored "80 years" of never-before-seen Batman storylines.
Tying it all together
A surprising amount of details about Ben Affleck's "Batman" film have trickled out over the years. We know that the villainous Deathstroke portrayed by Joe Manganiello would've played a significant role in the story, and it would've introduced a very different version of Batgirl. But throughout the years, it has remained unclear exactly which comic book arcs or issues might have served as an inspiration for the plot. According to Jay Oliva, Affleck and Johns were thinking much, much bigger:
"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."
"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."
Given the fact that Affleck's version of Bruce Wayne arrived in "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice," as an already past-his-prime brawler who had utterly lost his way over such long years of fighting crime in Gotham, it sounds like this could've been a really neat opportunity to give audiences a taste of several different comic storylines — and not just one, like Frank Miller's classic "The Dark Knight Returns" — that haven't been adapted in live-action before. Oliva goes so far as to praise the script as "very clever" and "a really great project in the beginning," but notes that he fully understood why Affleck had to step away in the end.
Of course, the loss of Affleck's "Batman" meant the gain of Matt Reeves' "The Batman," and Affleck received a decent sendoff in "The Flash," so perhaps things happen for a reason.