Ben Affleck claims the reason his Batman allegedly failed is because “it started to skew too old.”
In an interview with GQ, Affleck was asked if had “a coherent thought or postmortem” regarding his time with Batman.
He answered, “I had a really good time. I loved doing the Batman movie. 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.”
As for what went wrong, he said, “But what happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience.”
“Like even my own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie,” he explained. “And so when I saw that I was like, ‘Oh s**t, 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,” he concluded.
Affleck also discussed his time on the set of Justice League describing it as a “really excruciating experience.”
He explained that the reason why was because “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.”
He elaborated, “I mean, my failings as an actor, you can watch the various movies and judge. 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,” he continued. “But you’ve got to do a little bit better than that.”
Furthermore, he noted he has no intention of doing superhero movies anymore, “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.”
What do you make of Affleck’s diagnosis about what went wrong?
I had a lot of issues with how the DCEU depicted Batman (starting with how they began with him already in full Dark Knight Returns mode), but the idea of an older Batman isn’t a bad one. Let him have Robin, maybe Batgirl or even Nightwing. Show him compensating for his advancing age by fighting smarter and finding new ways to rest and recover. Batman doesn’t always have to be 30 and working alone (save Alfred).
What you have is two batman camps. You have the edgy "adult" batman, and the 60's Batman comedy show. There is no reason why DC can't do both, or launch a younger batman and robin, sort of like the Teen titan's cartoon.