The DCEU will shortly come to a close with “Blue Beetle” and “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” wrapping up a decade of occasional hit and mostly miss storytelling.
It also leaves behind a number of projects that never made it past the development stage, most notably Ben Affleck’s scrapped “Batman” film that he was slated to co-write, star in and direct.
The project fell apart, and Warners ultimately abandoned it in favour of a new standalone take from filmmaker Matt Reeves which became the Robert Pattinson-led “The Batman”.
We’ve had only a few teases as to what Affleck’s take was going to be. Cinematographer Robert Richardson previously teased the film was “going into the more insanity aspects” of the character and would utilise Arkham Asylum heavily.
Now, ex-DCEU storyboard artist Jay Oliva has spoken with Inverse about the film, which he served as a consultant on while it was in active development. Oliva has a large knowledge of the DC source material and explained the basics of Affleck’s vision:
“I can’t really say too much other than it was f—ing awesome. It was the best. It was amazing. From my understanding, there were a couple of drafts of it. When I was brought on, I don’t know whether it was the second draft or something, but it was what Geoff Johns and Ben [Affleck] had shown me.
I’ve worked on a lot of Batman things and what was really cool about it was, it was tying together a lot of really cool Batman storylines that had never been really explored.
Ben’s story was gonna cover something that had never really been covered in comics but was building off of storylines in the Batman mythos over the last 80 years and approaching it from a new kind of perspective.
Maybe someday I can spill the beans, but I still can’t talk about it. It was very clever and there were a lot of things about it that I really loved that I wish that had come to fruition. It was a really great project in the beginning. Ben had to step away for personal reasons, and I totally understood, but the time that I spent with Ben working on the project was fantastic.”
The films over the years have utilised various stories from the comics including elements of “Batman: Year One,” “The Long Halloween,” “Knightfall” and “No Man’s Land” among others. Some however haven’t made it to screen beyond TV, gaming and animated works such as “The Killing Joke,” “Hush” and The Court Of Owls storylines.
Affleck made a final appearance as Batman in “The Flash” in June.
Source: Inverse
