Robert Pattinson faced a huge amount of backlash when it was announced that he would be inheriting the role of Batman for Matt Reeves’ recently-halted reboot, mainly because of the fact that he played a starring role in the Twilight franchise a decade ago. People venting their frustrations about the actor cast as the Dark Knight is hardly a new thing, though, and dates back to fans bombarding Warner Bros. with angry letters in the pre-internet days when Michael Keaton was revealed as Tim Burton’s leading man over 30 years ago.
Pattinson’s predecessor also faced similar treatment, of course, with the news that Ben Affleck was set to play Batman in the recently-established DCEU sending the internet into meltdown when the story broke. Even though the actor had recently completely reinvented himself from tabloid fodder celebrity to critically-acclaimed filmmaker with the likes of Argo and The Town, many of the diehards still weren’t happy about the casting choice, simply because he was Ben Affleck.
While his tenure under the cape and cowl didn’t last very long, Affleck’s world-weary and grizzled take on the Caped Crusader won a lot of people over, with the general consensus now that the actor could have been an all-time great Batman if he’d stuck around a little longer, but was let down by the overall quality of the projects that he appeared in.
However, some fans couldn’t reconcile the fact that over the course of Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, it certainly appears as though Batman straight-up murders an awful lot of faceless henchmen, which goes against one of the character’s core principles. In a recent streaming event to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the movie though, Zack Snyder gave a tongue-in-cheek response when talking about the fate of these nameless goons.
“This is an example of the Batmobile’s armaments and it’s weapons. I’m sure these guys are fine. They’re going to be 100% okay, they’re not going to be dead. Those guys in the car there, they’re 100% fine. We should have done like an A-Team shot of them by the road getting up like, ‘Ugh, that hurt’. But they’re fine. Just for the PG-13 of it all.”
Although it hasn’t always been the case during his long and illustrious history on both page and screen, one of Batman’s major character traits is that he doesn’t kill anyone. While Zack Snyder may laugh it off now, people took it pretty seriously at the time and used it as a stick to beat his interpretations of the DC icon, even though these are many of the same fans lobbying for the release of the Snyder Cut.