If you thought watching the theatrical version of Justice League was painful, just imagine what it was like to make it.
Ben Affleck, the film’s Batman, revealed just how brutal the experience was in a new interview with the Los Angeles Times. Explaining why he wound up walking away from the solo Batman movie he was originally scheduled to both star in and direct — a project that eventually morphed into Matt Reeves’ The Batman starring Robert Pattinson — Affleck said he realized that he was “not going to be happy doing this” and wound up moving away from the world of DC Comics.
And it all boiled down to Justice League, which Affleck called the “nadir” of his time working in what he recently dubbed “IP movies.” And he had more negative things to say about the experience from there, although he admitted the problems weren’t entirely the film itself:
That was a bad experience because of a confluence of things: my own life, my divorce, being away too much, the competing agendas and then [director] Zack [Snyder]’s personal tragedy [Snyder’s daughter Autumn died by suicide in 2017] 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.’ It’s not even about, like, Justice League was so bad. Because it could have been anything.
Snyder wound up leaving Justice League mid-production, with Avengers writer/director Joss Whedon replacing him and finishing the movie. It’s his cut that wound up getting released as Justice League in the fall of 2017, and it’s that cut that bombed with critics and audiences. The whole situation finally got a happy ending when Snyder was able to return and direct a much longer version of the material as Zack Snyder’s Justice League, which was released on HBO Max last year.
The Batman is scheduled to open in theaters on March 4, 2022. And then Affleck will reprise his role as Batman in the upcoming The Flash next November. Something tells me that will be his last time as the Dark Knight. Just a hunch.
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