Ben Affleck won’t be answering calls from the Bat-Signal: the Batman actor is hanging up the cape and cowl for good after a final appearance in The Flash. In a new interview with The Los Angeles Times, Affleck says it was the making of 2017’s Justice League that pushed him to end his troubled tenure and announce he was retiring the Batman role in 2019. The DC superhero ensemble, which changed hands from Affleck’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice director Zack Snyder to Joss Whedon in the wake of a family tragedy, was the “worst experience” and one the actor won’t return to after renouncing so-called “IP movies.”
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After dropping out of starring in and writing-directing a standalone Batman movie, making Justice League “was the nadir for me,” Affleck told The Los Angeles Times. “That was a bad experience because of a confluence of things: my own life, my divorce, being away too much, the competing agendas and then Zack’s personal tragedy and the reshooting. It just was the worst experience. It was awful.”
Snyder stepped down from Justice League when his 20-year-old daughter, Autumn, died by suicide in 2017. Studio Warner Bros. brought on The Avengers writer-director Whedon for extensive reshoots and to handle post-production on the costly tentpole barreling towards its November release date.
Affleck’s personal struggles, including his public struggles with alcoholism and a divorce from his wife, actor Jennifer Garner, made it difficult for the actor to continue on in the role he’d played only twice: first in Batman v Superman and then David Ayer’s Suicide Squad, both released in 2016. The actor has addressed the backlash that accompanied his backlash when Snyder announced his Man of Steel sequel had found its Batman in 2013.
Justice League “was everything that I didn’t like about this. That became the moment where I said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore,’” Affleck said of his superhero role, his first since 2003’s Daredevil. “It’s not even about, like, Justice League was so bad. Because it could have been anything.”
In 2021, Affleck said playing Batman for his children was “worth every moment of suffering on Justice League.”
Despite publicly confirming he was exiting the DC Extended Universe as Batman, Affleck returned to the role for a brief round of additional photography in October 2020 to help Snyder complete and release the Snyder Cut. Affleck donned the cape and cowl for a new scene opposite the Joker (Jared Leto) in Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the fabled director’s cut released straight to streaming on HBO Max last March.
Affleck will play Batman a final time in The Flash, a time-traveling movie rumored to rewrite the DCEU and parts of the “Snyder-Verse” by installing an elder Batman (Michael Keaton) in Affleck’s place. In a recent interview with The Herald Sun, the 49-year-old actor called The Flash “a really nice finish on my experience with that character.”
The Flash opens in theaters on November 4.
