The current era of DC Studios hasn’t been without its hiccups. While excitement for Clayface is running high, Supergirl didn’t exactly set the world on fire, and The Batman Part II is currently caught in a holding pattern. But the long wait to see Robert Pattinson slip back into the Batsuit still feels less likely to cause angst than the DC of 2017 did with Justice League.
Even before fans got to watch a single frame, the movie had a weighty backstory; the original director, Zack Snyder, departed after his daughter died by suicide. He was replaced by Joss Whedon, who became a controversial figure around that time for a variety of related and unrelated reasons.
As superhero fans well know, the fabled “Snyder Cut” of Justice League finally saw the light of day on HBO Max in 2021. But there’s still lingering trauma from the experience for star Ben Affleck, whose misery during his Batman era, which also included Snyder’s 2016 film Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, was so palpable it famously spawned the “Sadfleck” meme.
The erstwhile Bruce Wayne was a recent guest on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast (via the Hollywood Reporter), where he looked back on Justice League with whatever the opposite of joyful nostalgia might be.
“The truth is, the experience of Justice League for me was so, so negative for lots of different reasons,” Affleck said. “Some of which [had] to do with where I was personally, some of which [had] to do with the tragedy that happened during the time, and also the fact that I really saw how not to make a movie like that when the studio is at odds with the filmmaker. You’re really making a mistake. That was what really doomed that.”
Affleck added that he was “really happy” for Snyder when the Snyder Cut finally came out.
“Boy, that was shitty,” Affleck recalled of what happened with Snyder while making Justice League. “Him being taken off that movie and the reshoots that we did—if you want the low point of my career, [it] was that.”
He also believes the studio used the fact that Snyder’s daughter had died as “an excuse” to replace him with the problematic Whedon. “The whole environment and vibe, much of which I wasn’t privy to, but that I sort of heard about secondhand in terms of [co-stars] Ray [Fisher] and Gal [Gadot] and other people’s experiences. It was just like, ‘Wow, this is about as gross as it gets.'”
In the same interview with Horowitz, Affleck recalled being approached about directing a Star Wars movie, around the time of The Force Awakens, and deciding not to do it. At the time, he said, his reaction was, “I like Star Wars, and I’m a fan, but I’m not the person to direct this movie. I just think someone else who has more passion for this is going to do a better job.”
He continued. “And that’s not like some great self-sacrificing thing, because I thought, like, I don’t know that I can make a great version of Star Wars or reinvent this. [There’s] a lot of challenges in reinventing that, in fact, that [we’ve] seen play out. It hasn’t been easy for them to reinvent that franchise. Some of them have done really well, and you’ve got this whole fan base that got its own very strong opinions. It just was one that—like plenty of scripts that I’ve gotten as a director; I’ve certainly gotten better scripts as a director than as an actor that I’ve turned down—but I just thought, I don’t think I could do it as well as somebody else. And I don’t want to direct something that I don’t feel like I have a chance to be really, really proud of.”
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