So you’ve seen the Warner Bros.’ DC Universe schedule as it extends out to 2020. And of course two items curiously missing on that list were a stand-alone Superman movie and solo Batman movie. The Man Of Steel, Henry Cavill recently addressed that with EW. “There’s plenty of time for individual Superman sequels,” he said. “He’s a tough character to tell. People like the darker vigilante. I think it speaks to the human psyche more easily rather than the god-like being that we can’t really understand. Once we have a more expansive universe we can delve more into the character of Superman and hopefully tell more stories.”
OK, so what about Batman? Well, we’ve heard rumors of a solo Batman film that Ben Affleck could direct himself to come out in 2019. And it looks like that is going to be a go. Deadline reports that Affleck is indeed going to direct the movie — after the actor/director’s next crime drama “Live By Night” which shoots this fall — and he’s going to co-write it as well. Joining him will be DC Comics’ chief creative officer Geoff Johns who oversees much of the DC Comics universe.
Johns is heavily involved in all corners of DC from writing memorable classic comics to writing for WB TV shows like “Smallville,” “Arrow” and “The Flash,” as well as the upcoming “Supergirl” show. The report says that Affleck and Johns are working fast and may have a script together by the end of this summer so that 2019 date is sounding more realistic given “Live By Night” will come out December 2016 and “Justice League Part 1” is set for 2017. He’ll need a little breathing room.
Affleck recently told EW that he took the role of Batman partially because he’d like to make a big-scale movie like this one day and he wanted to learn how one is made. “I thought if I was going to direct a movie like this, which I would like to do at some point, I need to have something of a refresher course of how these movies are done,” Affleck told the magazine. Sounds like this stand-alone picture will be the one. [Deadline]