Ben Affleck‘s reign as Batman in Zack Snyder’s DC Universe might have proven relatively short-lived, but in a new interview, the multi-hyphenate shared how that ill-fated run impacted other things beyond just his acting. That includes, in part, the formation of his production company Artists Equity.
The actor/writer/director/producer told GQ that after having the “excruciating experience” of starring in “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” “Justice League,” and “The Flash” as Batman, he realized that those DC adaptations were part of a “misalignment of agendas, understandings, expectations” within the overall framework of the franchise and studio Warner Bros.
“What happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience. Even my own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie,” Affleck said, adding that he personally supported the shift to showing Batman as a “sort of older, broken, damaged Bruce Wayne” instead. “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. There you have two entities, two people really wanting to do something different, and that is a really bad recipe.”
Affleck continued, “There are a number of reasons why that was a really excruciating experience. 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.”
He added that founding Artists Equity with Matt Damon was part of “actually [having] a way of trying to avoid” what happened during his Batman tenure. “I want to put together partnerships and filmmakers and cast and a studio apparatus that’s aligned, where precisely that kind of misalignment doesn’t happen and you have a much better work experience,” Affleck said.
The Oscar winner did admit that he “wasn’t bringing anything particularly wonderful” to the DC films at the time.
“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. I mean, my failings as an actor, you can watch the various movies and judge,” he said. “But more of my failings of, in terms of why I had a bad experience, part of it is that what I was bringing to work every day was a lot of unhappiness. So I wasn’t bringing a lot of positive energy to the equation. I didn’t cause problems, but I came in and I did my job and I went home. But you’ve got to do a little bit better than that.”
Affleck previously told The Hollywood Reporter that while he did “like a lot of the stuff” in “Batman v Superman,” it was the hodgepodge production of “Justice League” that made him realize he was “miserable” in the role.
Original “Justice League” director Snyder‘s daughter died during production, and Snyder exited the project, while Joss Whedon took over and allegedly discarded 90 percent of Snyder’s film. Whedon’s finished film was poorly received and the cast including Gal Gadot and Ray Fisher accused Whedon of being abusive on set and threatening their careers. Snyder later released his own cut of the film, with the cast returning for reshoots.
“The ‘Justice League‘ experience, the fact that those stories became somewhat repetitive to me and less interesting. ‘Justice League,’ you could teach a seminar on all the reasons why this is how not to do it,” Affleck said in 2023. “Ranging from production to bad decisions to horrible personal tragedy, and just ending with the most monstrous taste in my mouth.”
Affleck added of his “Justice League” experience, “The genius, and the silver lining, is that Zack Snyder eventually went to AT&T and was like, ‘Look, I can get you four hours of content.’ And it’s principally just all the slow motion that he shot in black-and-white. And one day of shooting with me and him. He was like, ‘Do you want to come shoot in my backyard?’ I was like, ‘I think there are unions, Zack. I think we have to make a deal.’ But I went and did it. And now [‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’] is my highest-rated movie on IMDb. Say what you want, it is my highest-rated career movie. I’ve never had one that went from nadir to pinnacle. Retroactively, it’s a hit. All of a sudden I was getting congratulated for the bomb I’m in.”
