Wherever you rank Ben Affleck on the list of live-action Batman actors, there’s no question he played DC Comics’ Caped Crusader longer than most. His version of Bruce Wayne debuted in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, then returned for a cameo in Suicide Squad, both cuts of Justice League, and finally The Flash. Affleck recently reflected on playing Batman in the DC Extended Universe, and that included sharing the epiphany he had that made him go, “Oh shit.”
Today marks the nine-year anniversary of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’s release, which makes for good timing with the publication of Affleck’s new interview with GQ. When the actor was asked if he had “a coherent thought or postmortem” about his time playing Batman, he started off saying:
I had a really good time. I loved doing the Batman movie. I loved Batman v Superman. And I liked my brief stints on The Flash that I did and when I got to work with Viola Davis on Suicide Squad for a day or two. In terms of creatively, I really think that I like the idea and the ambition that I had for it, which was of the sort of older, broken, damaged Bruce Wayne. And it was something we really went for in the first movie.
Ben Affleck’s first outing as Batman came four years after the release of The Dark Knight Rises, the concluding chapter of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy that saw Christian Bale wearing the cape and cowl. As Affleck mentioned, one of the ways his Batman stood out from the ones before is that he’d been fighting crime for well over two decades. He’d been pummeling criminals in Gotham City back when Clark Kent, played as an adult by Henry Cavill, was roughly a preteen around the time he was discovering his Kryptonian powers.
Which, of course, leads into the other big thing that distinguished Ben Affleck’s Batman: he was the first to live in a shared universe populated by other DC Comics superheroes, including Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Flash and Cyborg. However, looking back on this portion of his career, Affleck realized that specific problems started to emerge regarding the tone of the DCEU movies he appeared in. In his words:
But what happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience. Like even my own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie. And so when I saw that I was like, ‘Oh shit, we have a problem.’ Then I think that’s when you had a filmmaker that wanted to continue down that road and a studio that wanted to recapture all the younger audience at cross purposes. Then you have two entities, two people really wanting to do something different and that is a really bad recipe.
He’s being vague, but it’s reasonable to infer the “skew too old” part is in reference to the intensity of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, to the point that its Ultimate Edition was rated R. Zack Snyder’s Justice League had a similar tone that the public finally got to see when it was made available to stream with a Max subscription, but the theatrical cut helmed by Joss Whedon definitely had a lighter feel to it. The clashing of creative visions just doesn’t work in the long run, and I’ll go so far as to say it played a big role in the DCEU ultimately collapsing.
Still, for the most part, Ben Affleck had a positive experience bringing Batman to life, and maybe there will come a day when he could reprise the role similarly to what Michael Keaton did in The Flash. For now, Affleck’s successor, Robert Pattinson, will return to role in 2027’s The Batman: Part II. Additionally, the new DC Universe continuity will have its own Batman who will star in The Brave and the Bold.