Ben Affleck’s Scrapped Standalone ‘Batman’ Vehicle Was Uniquely “Awesome” Riff On “80 Years” Of DC Mythology, Storyboard Artist Says

The scrapped standalone Batman movie that Ben Affleck was set to direct and star in nearly a decade ago had all the potential in the world to be an exciting addition to the DC canon, per Jay Oliva, a veteran storyboard artist who consulted with Affleck and others on the project.

Affleck would’ve reprised his role as the Caped Crusader after inhabiting it for both Justice League and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but he departed the project six years ago for personal reasons. While Oliva couldn’t say “too much” in a new interview with Inverse about what this film would have been like if it had seen the light of day, he did reveal that “it was f*cking awesome. It was the best. It was amazing.”

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To his understanding, he said, “a couple of drafts” of the script had been done before he was brought on to discuss it with Affleck and Geoff Johns, then-President and Chief Creative Officer at DC Entertainment. “I’ve worked on a lot of Batman things, and what was really cool about it was [that] it was tying together a lot of really cool Batman storylines that had never been really explored,” Oliva revealed. “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.”

The veteran storyboard artist and filmmaker went on to say that the project “was very clever, and there were a lot of things about it that I really loved that I wish that had come to fruition.” He “totally understood” when Affleck expressed his need to depart, he added, “but the time that I spent with Ben working on the project was fantastic. Maybe someday I can spill the beans, but I still can’t talk about it.”

In an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! back in 2019, Affleck offered that while he’d worked on developing this Batman film with “a really good screenwriter,” he ultimately felt he “couldn’t crack” the story in the way he was hoping to and felt it was “time for someone else to take a shot at it.” In an interview with The New York Times the following year, he said that when he shared his script with someone in his circle, he was told that it was “good.” But nonetheless there were concerns that he’d “drink [himself] to death” if he were to pursue the project.

RELATED: Ben Affleck Dropped Out Of ‘The Batman’ Amid Fears He’d “Drink Himself To Death”

Affleck has long been open about his struggles with alcoholism, which saw him move toward sobriety in the late 1990s. He donned Batman’s cape again this year in Warner Bros’ The Flash, finding himself one of a number of A-listers inhabiting the role in the film, which was released on June 12.

Taking the place of Affleck’s The Batman as the most recent standalone flick on the vigilante, following his departure as director and star, was a Robert Pattison-led title of the same name from filmmaker Matt Reeves, which opened in March 2022 and grossed over $770M worldwide.

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