Without ever seeing a lick of footage or even knowing what Zack Snyder is planning for Superman vs. Batman (Man of Steel 2, whatever), a number of folks have already deemed Ben Affleck as Batman to be a total fail. Such is the nature of the Internet nowadays, where one can somehow use as "proof" his 10-year-old performance in Daredevil that his Batman just has to suck. Because obviously. So we've heard perhaps too much from the peanut gallery, and not much at all from Affleck himself until last night when he finally broke his silence.
While talking to Jimmy Fallon, Affleck talked about being excited to take on the Batman role, noting that it was the strong material that helped him make the decision....
"It's so awesome, man. I'm so excited. They called me up and said, 'do you want to do this,' and I'm like, 'What? I'm not 25, man, are you sure about this? They said come down and we'll show you what we're doing, and it was incredible. Zack, the director, Zack Snyder is directing, he has this incredible take on it, that's like… Obviously we can't do what Chris [Nolan] and Christian [Bale] did, those movies are amazing, so he wants to do something different, but still in keeping with that, so I had to like, I thought this is a brilliant way to do this and I really know how to hook into this. And I said, 'okay, I want to do it.'
But what about the fans? Well, he admits to being prepared for the worst, but also being a little shocked at just how loud the outcry against him turned out to be....
"And the people from the studio were like, 'we're thrilled, we're so excited… and listen, we want to talk to you, because people go through this process and it is a little bit, it can be trying. We want to show you some of the reactions that past cast members have got on the internet.' So they sent me people who were in these movies that did a great job and people were like, 'kiiilll him!' I was like, you can't say that before the movie comes out. It doesn't matter what the people think then, it matters what they think when they see the movie. But I was like, 'I'm a big boy. I can handle an Emmy snub, I can handle anything. They said, just don't use the internet for a couple of days. I said, 'I handle sh*t, you know what I mean. I'm very tough. So I saw the announcement, I look at the first comment and it’s like, ‘Ben Affleck is going to be Batman’ and the first person goes, 'Noooooo!' I'm like 'We're going to be Luddites for awhile, kids.'"
At least he's keeping a good sense of humor about it. No matter what he does there will always be a large and extremely vocal group who will hate what he does regardless, and that only gets amplified when dealing with iconic characters like Batman.
Superman vs. Batman opens on July 17th. You can watch the interview in full below.
