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Credit: Inside the MagicBen Affleck shed some light on the project…
While it took a minute for fans to warm up to him, Ben Affleck became one of the more popular iterations of Batman in recent years. It makes sense, therefore, that fans were more than a little disappointed when James Gunn and Peter Safran took the helm at DC Studios and put the kibosh on many projects, including a future standalone Batman movie for Ben Affleck, but what a movie it would have been!
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Batman has a deep catalog of characters, both heroes and villains, only some of which have made it to the big screen. Of course, Adam West’s Batman (1966) brought Catwoman (Lee Meriwether), The Joker (Cesar Romero), The Penguin (Burgess Meredith), and The Riddler (Frank Gorshin) to the movies, all of which have seen subsequent reboots as recently as The Batman (2022), but there are certainly more.
The Dark Knight trilogy broke new ground with Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy) and Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson), as well as a few other side characters never seen in a Batman Movie before, like Victor Zsasz (Tim Booth), but even then, there were still plenty missing. Of course, with Suicide Squad (2016), fan-favorite Harley Quinn (Margot Robbie) finally made her live-action debut, and though Batman has been mentioned by her more than a few times, they still haven’t come face to face.
Still, there are many characters that haven’t made it to the live-action big screen to fight the Caped Crusader: characters like Clayface, Hugo Strange, Mad Hatter, Hush, Ventriloquist, and others who bring a lot to the Batman rogue’s gallery, and others who’ve made it to live-action like Killer Croc (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), and Slade Wilson/Deathstroke (Joe Manganiello), but it’s the latter who would have given Ben Affleck’s Batman a run for his money.
In comments from a Justice League (2017) panel reported by The Direct, Affleck revealed his plans for his standalone Batman movie, including further plans for Deathstroke as the chief antagonist:
“There were a number of them that I was kind of exploring. And, the plans were to make interesting, nuanced, complex characters, in particular to the character you mentioned. I kind of feel like either you do – I’m just going to get into my own preference here – but either you do a kind of massive one villain that is so formidable you just can’t imagine how your protagonist is going to be able to overcome it. Or you have to really sort of populate kind of, you know, Injustice – these big group villains – where you have to get all these different characters.”
Deathstroke certainly would have been formidable as an antagonist. In the run of the comics and other media, there have been few characters that have matched Batman as he, and fewer still that haven’t already been adapted time and again. A new Batman movie with such a character as the main villain may have been just what could have revitalized the franchise, were it not for James Gunn and Peter Safran’s reboot.
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Now, whether it ends up being Ben Affleck or someone else, the next iteration of the character will see Bruce Wayne as a father to Damian Wayne in the DC film Batman: The Brave and the Bold (?), which has been announced by Gunn, but details, including a release date, are still unknown. It could well be that the new Batman appears in Superman: Legacy (2025), but that, at this point, is pure speculation.
What do you think of these comments? Let Inside the Magic know in the comments below!