The 2016 “oh shit” moment that made Ben Affleck re-evaluate his career: “That is a really bad recipe”
After years in the Hollywood doghouse (and rightfully so), Ben Affleck roared back into the public eye in the early 2010s.
His comeback was solidified when Argo, a film he starred in and directed, won the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’, and a few years later, he was given a role that reflected his ascent back to the top of Hollywood, but also led him back into the dark ages.
In 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Affleck stepped into the iconic (if somewhat uncomfortable) suit of Gotham City’s most famous resident. This was part of the Zack Snyder-led DC Extended Universe (DCEU), which was designed to challenge Marvel’s box office dominance. ‘Bat-fleck’, as he became known, appeared in a total of four DCEU movies, five if you include Snyder’s vanity project version of Justice League.
While Batman might be a dream role for most actors, it quickly turned into a nightmare; the DCEU collapsed under its own weight almost as soon as it began. Affleck was involved in one of its earliest disasters, the much-memed “My mom’s name is also Martha” moment from Dawn of Justice.
By the time the franchise wheezed and spluttered into the grave, Affleck’s version of the ‘Caped Crusader’ was being called the worst ever. He didn’t even get his own standalone movie, which says it all really.
Looking back on this part of his career with GQ, Affleck said he enjoyed playing the ‘Dark Knight’. He cited working with Viola Davis, who played Amanda Waller, as a particular highlight, but his problems came when the content of the DCEU stopped matching up with what he thought he’d signed on for.
“It started to skew too old for a big part of the audience,” he explained, “My own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie. And so when I saw that, I was like, ‘Oh shit, we have a problem’. Then I think that’s when you had a filmmaker that wanted to continue down that road and a studio that wanted to recapture all the younger audience at cross purposes. Then you have two entities, two people really wanting to do something different, and that is a really bad recipe.”
The “filmmaker” Affleck is referring to is almost certainly Snyder, who spearheaded the early portion of the DCEU and clearly wanted to take the series in a darker direction than what Kevin Feige was doing on the other side. There just wasn’t an appetite for this sort of thing, though. Marvel had established a reliable formula that people wanted to see over and over again, and DC just wasn’t as fun.
The failure of the DCEU is one of the most fascinating Hollywood case studies of recent times. On paper, it should have been a runaway success, but it found itself dead in the water almost immediately. Snyder might have taken the brunt of the criticism, but Affleck doesn’t deserve to get off scot-free either. There’s a reason no one is clamouring for his return.
