Ben Affleck’s The Batman will forever be one of cinema’s great ‘What ifs.’ For a while, it looked like the Academy Award-winning screenwriter-director was all set to bring his own spin to the iconic comic book hero that he portrayed in Zack Snyder’s Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League. Now, thanks to cinematographer Robert Richardson, we know exactly where the movie would have been set.
Rumors that Ben’s Batman would have explored Arkham Asylum have been swirling since its announcement in 2015, but Richardson’s interview on Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast finally confirms it.
“I wanted to shoot Batman with Ben cause that was the next film we had. There was a script, but not a loved script. There was a lot of work he was doing to it to change it. He was going into the more insanity aspects… He was entering more into the Arkham, he’s going into where everyone was bad.”
Richardson, who most recently served as the DP on Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, sounded pretty excited about taking the Caped Crusader into a more horrific direction that we’ve never seen on the big screen before, so it’s a shame that the story just couldn’t come together. While Affleck’s Batman may not have been universally loved, I can’t help but to mourn the loss of watching him go toe-to-toe with the inmates of Arkham.
By 2017, Affleck had handed over the directing duties to War of the Planet of the Apes’ Matt Reeves, and by 2018, handed over the writing reins as well. Not long after, Affleck hung up the cowl completely.
While we don’t know if Reeves’ current script will take Robert Pattinson deep into the annals of Arkham, we do know it’s expected to have an abundance of villains, and everybody from Dave Bautista to Nicki Minaj wants in on a role. The good news is that The Batman just entered pre-production, and is on track for a June 25th, 2021 release, so it won’t be too much longer until we get a clear idea of who will be in it and what it’ll be about.