By: Russ Burlingame on August 24, 2012
The Toronto Sun is reporting that Ben Affleck is not currently working on a Justice League feature film, and that while his terminology leaves some room for ambiguity, it seems unlikely he will work on the project in the future.
“I’m not working on the Justice League,” said Affleck in an interview conducted yesterday. “One of the problems with entertainment web sites is that they need to fill pages, and that’s how rumours get started.”
It was, of course, The Hollywood Reporter who originally brought the news that Warner Brothers was interested in recruiting Affleck to work on the Warner Brothers superhero mash-up film. Being that their bread-and-butter is a print magazine, filling pages is not generally a problem they have…but Affleck’s point remains largely true, in that those initial reports, once repeated endlessly through the media and on social networking sites, became gospel.
Deadline Hollywood reported the next day that they had known for some time that Warner Brothers was apparently interested in bringing Affleck into the project, but that they had not run with the story because Affleck’s representatives told them it was a non-starter–but that had the predictable impact of just creating a second round of stories about the second round of rumors.
Added the actor/filmmaker, “Justice League sounds really exciting, but it’s not something I’m working on.”
The Sun notes that Affleck’s choice to use the present tense–that he’s not working on the project–allows him some flexibility if he should decide to take on the film in the future, but it seem unlikely that he would even address the question if he had any doubt in his mind as to how it might play out.
