Why Ben Affleck Should Be the Caped Crusader

One of the most common criticisms of Ben Affleck’s casting as Batman that we’ve seen so far has been, essentially, that Affleck is a younger George Clooney.Like Clooney, detractors say, he’ll make a perfectly good Bruce Wayne but his Batman will leave audiences wanting. Affleck, they claim, isn’t capable of generating the kind of dark and brooding Batman that audiences expect.Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen–but what if that’s not the Batman Warner Bros. wants right now anyway?It wasn’t that long ago that ComicBook.com talked about the prospect of Affleck playing a “kinder, gentler” Batman, and it still seems as though that might be in the card–and if it is, it might not be as bad as everyone is fearing.Batman, like Superman, has a lot of different nicknames–and while The Dark Knight has gotten the most mileage in the recent past, but Batman is a character who’s open to reinvention and whose long history as a crime fighter has seen more than one iteration of his personality. Back in 1966, the preferred nickname was the “Caped Crusader,” and maybe it’s time that made a comeback on the big screen.Don’t get us wrong; we don’t want to see an Adam West-style Batman hanging out with the Man of Steel Superman. That would be just…weird. No, what we mean is that maybe it’s time to embrace some of Batman’s other sensibilities and really take a look at some elements of the character that haven’t ever been done onscreen before.Like what? Well…