It was recently confirmed that Ben Affleck will direct a standalone Batman movie which he’s been writing alongside comic book scribe Geoff Johns, but talking to reporters on the set of Justice League last week, the actor and filmmaker confirmed that he’s not yet ready to move forward with it. As a result, there’s a chance the movie won’t meet its planned release date.
“I think they have a date for it. Although, I don’t know if I would necessarily be able to make that date because I don’t have a script that’s ready yet. So that’s my—my timetable is I’m not going to make a movie until there’s a script that I think is good because I’ve been on the end of the things when you make movies when you have a script that’s not good yet and it doesn’t pan out.” Before you jump to the conclusion that Affleck was referring to the divisive Batman v Superman there, he’s no doubt actually talking about the Daredevil movie!
Regardless, Affleck then elaborated on that point. “I have a script, we’re still working on it, and I’m not happy enough with it yet to actually go out there and make a Batman movie, for which I have the highest of standards, I would say. That’s something that would have to pass a very high bar for me. It’s not just like, ‘Yeah, that might be fun, let’s go try this out.”
When that Batman movie is going to happen is once again up in the air then, but we won’t have to wait long before seeing his Caped Crusader back on the big screen. He’ll appear in Suicide Squad this August and is rumoured to show up in Wonder Woman next summer too.
After that, Affleck is obviously going to have a leading role in Justice League, a movie he was recently upped to the status of executive producer on. So, what led to that alteration?
“Why I’m an executive producer is that I’m directing one of the movies. So there’s sort of this cross-pollination of story and characters and I don’t want to give any of that stuff away, but it basically means that there are some things that might happen in my Batman that are affected by, I mean, here we are in the police station in Gotham City. There’s a potential that something like this might exist in that story. So it’s a creative way that DC came up with of kind of being a filmmaker-driven company and entity and also making sure that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing and so that there’s collaboration and supervision.”So that somebody doesn’t go sailing off, causing problems for your movie with their movie.”
“You know, in a way, it’s also a kind of a courtesy. You know what they’re doing, one hand knows what the other is doing, and I get to weigh in on stuff that impacts the Batman stuff.”
Well, that all makes sense! Stay tuned for much more on Justice League later this week.
