Joe Manganiello Says Ben Affleck’s Batman Solo Movie Was Going to Be “Really Dark”

There was a time not too long ago Ben Affleck was going to star as Bruce Wayne in his very own Batman franchise. Spinning out of the events of Zack Snyder’s Justice League two-parter, those plans were soon dashed after Snyder left the project and Warner Brothers chose to reboot the property with a new set of features from Matt Reeves. According to Batman star Joe Manganiello — who was on tap to play Deathstroke in the feature, reprising his role from a Justice League post-credits scene — Affleck’s take on the Caped Crusader was going be quite the dark affair.

“It was a really dark story in which Deathstroke was like a shark or a horror movie villain that was dismantling Bruce’s life from the inside out,” the star said in a recent interview with Yahoo! Entertainment. “It was this systemic thing: He killed everyone close to Bruce and destroyed his life to try and make him suffer because he felt that Bruce was responsible for something that happened to him.”

According to the website, Manganiello compared the take to Frank Miller’s iconic “Born Again” Daredevil comics run. “It was really cool, really dark, and really hard,” Manganiello added. “I was very excited for it.”

Though Deathstroke won’t be back in an Affleck-starring movie, he is currently set to reprise his role in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, a four-part mini-series rehashing the theatrical release of the feature to tell the story Snyder originally set out to tell.

“If you said to any of the actors in the movie ‘well what happens in the movie’ or ‘what happens later’ or whatever for any movie. And they go ‘well I got the script and it’s cool and I kind of know this and-‘ so [Ray Porter] and I were talking about this and what’s cool or what’s the right response to some questions,” Snyder said previously. “It’s a fair question to ask me, you know, like what do I say to the world about, you know, what happens when Darkseid comes to Earth? Then what? You know, Is that a thing? And I think, listen, the truth is that did I write and did I have and conceive a complete- do I know what happens when Darkseid… yes. I do know what happens. To say and to speculate about what that is and that that would be exciting, I think that’s a fine thing.”

Matt Reeves’ The Batman is now set for release on March 4, 2022.

What other villains do you hope to see in Reeves new Batman universe? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section!