Last year, Matt Reeves’ The Batman was released and introduced the world to Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne, but there was a time when this project was supposed to give Ben Affleck’s Batman his own platform. Ahead of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’s release in 2016, Affleck team with then-DC Entertainment Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns to work on the DC movie’s script, but it was ultimately decided to scrap this angle in favor of going the reboot route. Now a veteran from the DC Extended Universe has opened up about how deeply Affleck’s version of The Batman would have explored the Caped Crusader’s mythos, and he dropped an f-bomb while doing so.
Jay Oliva has been a storyboard artist on numerous DC projects, including DCEU entries Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Wonder Woman and Justice League (both versions). He also served in a consultant-like during the DCEU era, and as such was eventually looped into the development of Ben Affleck’s The Batman. In an interview with Inverse, Oliva noted that while he couldn’t “say much about this project,” he first described it as “fucking awesome” and “amazing,” then added the following:
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... 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.
At the time Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice came out, eight live-action Batman movies had been released, along with many more animated ones either in theaters or direct-to-video. Throwing in his many comic book appearances since debuting in 1939’s Detective Comics #27, and it’d be difficult for anyone to keep track of all the kinds of adventures Batman’s been in over the decades. And yet, according to Oliva, Affleck’s The Batman would have eschewed delivering some kind adaptation of a story like Batman: Year One or The Dark Knight Returns in favor of delivering an original story that, while pulling from the source material, delved into material that had never been directly covered before.
While Jay Oliva wasn’t willing to divulge any specifics, in the years since the Ben Affleck version of The Batman was scrapped, fans have learned a handful of plot details about it, including that Joe Manganiello’s Deathstroke would have been the main antagonist and Batgirl would have appeared. We may never learn any of the more specific beats story beats, but it’s clear that Oliva was impressed by the work that was poured into the project. As he put it:
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. 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. Maybe someday I can spill the beans, but I still can't talk about it.
Back in 2019, Affleck said that the reason he walked away from The Batman was because he couldn’t “crack” the script, but the following year, he also acknowledged that his alcoholism factored into his exit. By May 2023, Affleck stated that there was a “whole elaborate plan” for The Batman, but he felt he “wasn't quite sure if it worked or jived” and ended up “precise location or target” he’d hoped to hit. As the years pass, hopefully people like Affleck, Oliva and Johns will be willing to share even more about the DCEU’s The Batman so fans have a better idea of what could have been. Even better, maybe DC would be willing one day to take that written material and adapt it into a comic book limited series.
If you’re interested in revisiting the version of The Batman we did get, it can be viewed with a Max subscription. That corner of the DC multiverse will expand with The Penguin miniseries being made for the same streaming platform, followed by The Batman: Part II being slated on the upcoming DC movies schedule for an October 3, 2025 release.
