The DCEU is in a bit of a mess right now, what with that overhaul being done by new honchos James Gunn and Peter Safran that might not be as complete as previously reported. (For one thing, Gal Gadot may return as Wonder Woman after all. Unless she doesn’t.) One person who was already done with them before the makeover was Ben Affleck, who played Batman across seven films, yet never got a solo outing. He almost did, which was to be helmed by Affleck himself, and if one DCEU staffer is to be believed, that’s our loss.
“I can’t really say too much other than it was f*cking awesome,” DC Comics director and storyboard artist Jay Olivia recently told Inverse (as caught by Entertainment Weekly). “It was the best. It was amazing.”
After his Bruce Wayne debut in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Affleck was tasked to handle his own solo venture himself. It eventually fell apart, with the actor/filmmaker saying he “couldn’t crack it.” He did get as far as pounding out a script, which someone told him was “good,” but who added, “I also think you’ll drink yourself to death if you go through what you just went through again.”
So what was a Batman movie from the director of Argo supposed to be like? We may find out later, but for now you’ll have to subsist on the vague praise of Olivia:
“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 … 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.”
“It was very clever and there were a lot of things about it that I really loved that I wish that had come to fruition… It was a really great project in the beginning. Ben had to step away for personal reasons, and I totally understood, but the time that I spent with Ben working on the project was fantastic.”
Of course, a solo Batman movie did come out. It was called The Batman and it was completely unrelated to the main DCEU, much like Joker. As for Affleck, he’s doing pretty good for himself. Instead of doing a movie about a rich guy who dresses up like a bat and fights crime, he made a movie about some guys who made a shoe.
