Ben Affleck Soured On Batman & Superhero Genre After “Excruciating Experience” Making ‘Justice League’

We shouldn’t be expecting Ben Affleck returning the superhero genre anytime soon as the actor has revealed in a new interview that while he enjoyed playing Batman in things like “Batman v Superman,” “Suicide Squad,” and “The Flash,” when it comes to “Justice League” it is partly the reason he has soured on the idea of ever returning to the superhero genre.

Affleck recalled that most of his time playing the Caped Crusader was enjoyable, even those brief cameos in other DC Comics films, but he eventually lost his ambition for it.

“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,” Affleck recently told GQ Magazine in an extensive profile piece as he promoted “The Accountant 2.”

READ MORE: ‘The Accountant 2’ Review: Ben Affleck & Jon Bernthal Fight For The Buddy Comedy In A Sad Excuse Of An Action Movie [SXSW]

“Justice League” was a much different and “excruciating experience” for the actor. The movie was plagued with studio micromanging and reshoots as “Avengers” director Joss Whedon was brought on to help with adding new scenes and a lighter tone as Zack Snyder was busy dealing with a family tragedy and grieving. All of this was happening while Affleck was in a very dark place as his drinking admittedly, became a problem.

“There are a number of reasons why that was a really excruciating experience, Affleck said of his feelings on the troubled production. “And they don’t all have to do with the simple dynamic of, say, being in a superhero movie or whatever. I am not interested in going down that particular genre again, not because of that bad experience, but just: I’ve lost interest in what was of interest about it to me. But I certainly wouldn’t want to replicate an experience like that. A lot of it was misalignment of agendas, understandings, expectations. And also by the way, I wasn’t bringing anything particularly wonderful to that equation at the time, either. I had my own failings, significant failings, in that process and at that time.”

“What happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience,” Affleck added in an honest post-mortem on the superhero crossover pic. “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.”

With that said, we all know what happened next as Warners hit the reset button with James Gunn and Peter Safran relaunching a new DC Cinematic Universe starting with the mature animated series “Creature Commandos” alongside “Superman” and “Supergirl” reboots on deck.

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Thankfully, Affleck has plenty of other projects to focus on with a bright post-Batman future and could ultimately never return to superhero movies (although fans still are holding out hope for a Daredevil variant cameo in the MCU’s Multiverse films like “Avengers: Secret Wars“). There is now a push from DC Studios to find their DCU Bruce Wayne as Robert Pattinson (“The Batman”) has been ruled out as leading upcoming films such as “The Brave & The Bold.”

Pattinson will, however, lead Matt Reeves‘ “The Batman Part II,” which is set for release on October 1, 2027, as we patiently wait for more plot/villain details and new casting announcements as production on the sequel ramps up.

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