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

deadline.com:

The scrapped standalone Batman movie that Ben Affleck was set, a little less than a decade ago, to direct and star in 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 here reprised his role as the Caped Crusader after inhabiting it for both Justice League and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, departing 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***ing awesome.

It was the best. It was amazing.” 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, the former 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, 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.