There’s only two films left before the DCEU wraps: “Blue Beetle” on August 18, and “Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom” on December 20. After that, James Gunn & Peter Safran start from scratch with their DCU, with Gunn’s “Superman: Legacy” kicking things off in 2025. Speaking of legacies, the DCEU leaves behind one full of critical disappointments, missed opportunities, and things that might have been. Highest among those? Ben Affleck‘s scrapped “Batman” film.
And Inverse reports that, according to ex-DCEU storyboard artist Jay Oliva, Affleck’s ideas before he walked away from the project were the most ambitious he’d ever seen for the Caped Crusader. “I can’t really say too much other than it was fucking awesome,” Oliva told the outlet. “It was the best. It was amazing.” Oliva worked on the project as a consultant while it was in active development, thanks to his knowledge of the DCEU source material. And what he saw was enough for him to realize how special Affleck’s vision for the project was.
“From my understanding, there were a couple of drafts of it,” Oliva said about his time working on the scuttled film. “When I was brought on, I don’t know whether it was the second draft or something, but it was what Geoff Johns and Ben [Affleck] had shown me.” So what did Johns and Affleck have in mind for Batman? “I’ve worked on a lot of Batman things and what was really cool about it was, it was tying together a lot of really cool Batman storylines that had never been really explored,” Oliva continued.
Classic comic book stories have been used for previous “Batman” films, like Frank Miller‘s “Batman: Year One” being a loose influence on Christopher Nolan‘s 2005 film “Batman Begins” and Zack Snyder referencing Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” for “Batman v Superman.” Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” also uses aspects of the “Knightfall” storyline, which sees Bane break Batman’s back and break the hero’s greatest villains out of Arkham Asylum. But Oliva hinted that Affleck had other stories in mind for his take on Bruce Wayne/Batman. “Ben’s story was gonna cover something that had never really been covered in comics but was building off of storylines in the Batman mythos over the last 80 years and approaching it from a new kind of perspective,” Oliva said.
Of course, there have been several incredible stories in Batman comics since the character’s creation in 1939. Some of those, like Alan Moore‘s “The Killing Joke,” Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee‘s “Batman: Hush,” and Loeb and Tim Sale‘s “Batman: The Long Halloween,” have been made into animated movies since Affleck left his Batman pic behind. However, storylines like “A Death In The Family,” “Batman: Venom,” and the more recent “The Court Of Owls” have never influenced live-action Batman films.
So which stories did Affleck want to incorporate in his movie? Oliva wouldn’t, or couldn’t, give anything away. “Maybe someday I can spill the beans,” he said, “but I still can’t talk about it.” But Oliva did add that Affleck and Johns’ ideas were very bold. “It was very clever and there were a lot of things about it that I really loved that I wish that had come to fruition,” he continued. “It was a really great project in the beginning. Ben had to step away for personal reasons, and I totally understood, but the time that I spent with Ben working on the project was fantastic.”
Affleck briefly returned as Batman in “The Flash” this year, and may do so again in December for the “Aquaman” sequel, but his time as the Dark Knight is over. But maybe when the DCU gets off the ground, he and Oliva may spill the beans about what the actor-director had in mind for his Batman project.
