There has been a lot of weeping and gnashing of teeth in certain corners of the internet over the casting of Ben Affleck as Batman in “Superman Vs. Batman.” And even though we’re still a long time away from seeing any footage or having an idea of what the story will be, some folks have already their mind made up. So you can understand why Warner Bros. might’ve wanted to cushion Affleck for the blows he’d receive online after the announcement was made, but according to the actor, he was more than ready to roll with the punches. At least at first.
“I said… ‘I handle shit,’ you know what I mean—I’m very tough,” he told Jimmy Fallon last night on “Late Night.” “So I saw the announcement I look at the first comment and it’s like ‘Ben Affleck is going to be Batman’ and the first goes ‘NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!’ I’m like… kids we’re going to be Luddites now.”
Affleck was pretty cool about it all, but he underscored how good the material was as the ultimate reason he decided to take the gig at all. “I thought ‘Well, I’m not 25, man, and are you sure about this?’ And they said come down we want to show you what we’re doing, and it was incredible…,” he explained. “Zack (Snyder) had this incredible take on it. Obviously you can’t do what Christian [Bale] did—those movies are awesome, amazing. So [Snyder] wants to do something different but still in keeping with that so I thought… This is a brilliant way to do this, I really know how to hook into this.’ ”
As for finding a hook into the material, it might be a bit harder for “Man Of Steel” composer Hans Zimmer. Providing a fantastic score for Snyder’s film, he’s now a bit torn about once again tuning up a movie featuring Batman, considering he did it three times for Christopher Nolan‘s trilogy. And as you might expect, while he hasn’t yet been formally asked, he’s a bit uncertain about whether or not he’ll return.
“I think it’s really important for everybody to always take a deep breath and have a think about it. Do we really want to embark on this journey? Because the question really is: Do I have anything new to say? Is there anything I could add that I haven’t done already? When we did ‘Batman Begins,’ we saw that as an autonomous movie. We never knew we were going to do two and three. Everybody thinks, ‘Oh, of course you did!’ If you think about it, though, we never knew,” Zimmer told Huffington Post. “Like, in ‘Lord of the Rings,’ everyone knew that the little guy was going to throw the ring in the volcano. We never had that. At the same time, of course, my mandate was treat each one as an autonomous movie, but you can’t shift stylistically quite that much. The fun thing is if you can shift stylistically, that’s what you want to do. For better or for worse, you want to reinvent yourself every time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.”
But we like said, still a long time to go and and lots of creative decisions yet to come. “Superman Vs. Batman” lands on July 17, 2015. Watch Affleck’s full chat with Fallon below. [via The Wrap & ComicBookMovie]
