Zack Snyder Wants to See Ben Affleck’s Batman vs. Joe Manganiello’s Deathstroke After Justice League

Zack Snyder would 'love to see' Batman (Ben Affleck) versus Deathstroke (Joe Manganiello) after [...]

By Cameron Bonomolo

Zack Snyder would "love to see" Batman (Ben Affleck) versus Deathstroke (Joe Manganiello) after Zack Snyder's Justice League. Both actors returned for additional photography to complete the four-hour and R-rated Snyder Cut and would have gone head-to-head in the since-abandoned version of The Batman directed by Affleck, who stepped away from the DC Extended Universe when he retired the cape and cowl in 2019. But now that Batfleck returns in Zack Snyder's Justice League — and again opposite Ezra Miller and Michael Keaton's Batman in The Flash — Snyder wants the Bat-versus-blade promised by Affleck's never-made Batman standalone movie:

"I love Joe, he's great. I really would love to see those two go at it, that would be fun," Snyder told I Minutemen. "Who knows? We know that Ben's gonna be in The Flash movie, which is nice to see him [back as Batman]. It's trickling down, it's nice."

According to frequent Snyder collaborator and storyboard artist Jay Oliva, who tweeted support for the unmade movie in December, the Affleck-directed Batman would have "made fans proud."

"Look, I would love for Ben to make that Deathstroke movie. That would be amazing," Snyder previously told John Doe Movie Reviews. "I don't know that he's going to, or that they [studio Warner Bros.] want him to, but I would love for him to do it. That would be so cool. And Joe is amazing."

Manganiello, who debuted as the assassin Slade Wilson in the post-credits scene ending the theatrical version of Justice League released in 2017, revealed new details from Affleck's Batman when he told Yahoo the movie would have been "really cool, really dark, and really hard."

"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," Manganiello said. "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."

Addressing his own potential return to the DCEU after the Snyder Cut, the Man of Steel and Batman v Superman filmmaker told I Minutemen that "there's no interest and/or appetite to do more of these movies from Warner Bros. With me, anyway." Snyder recently acknowledged his Justice League is set "slightly elsewhere" in terms of the officially recognized canon, telling The Film Junkee, "Just because with this version of Justice League ... I kind of just do my own thing a lot more than I did in the [DCEU films]."

Warner Bros. releases Zack Snyder's Justice League March 18 on HBO Max.

Trending Now: