It’s been a big year for Ben Affleck, who put on the black cape in both Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad this summer, but the later part of this year will see him sink his teeth into more understated, non-superhero roles. He’ll make math thrilling in The Accountant in October, and after that he’ll venture down into the gangster underworld of the 1920s in Live By Night, which is looking like an awards season contender now that its wide release date has been moved up to January 2018.
If you liked the scene in Batman v Superman where Bruce Wayne watched YouTube videos about the future members of the Justice League, you'll love Suicide Squad. Instead of just one scene of plot-stopping fan service, Suicide Squad delivers an entire first act of soul-deadening exposition. The movie spends nearly 30 story-free minutes with a Machiavellian bureaucrat while she sits in a restaurant discussing a top secret personnel file. Here is Deadshot, the world’s greatest assassin; this is Harley Quinn, the Joker’s psychotic girlfriend. Oh, and have you heard about Captain Boomerang? And on and on and on.
“In a democracy,” says Holly Hunter’s Senator Finch in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, “good is a conversation, not a unilateral decision.” The 32 minutes added to the movie’s “Ultimate Edition,” now available digitally and released on Blu-ray and DVD July 19, include a lot of unnecessary shoe leather, and fills in gaps that don’t need the extra gob of narrative spackle.
Warner Bros. has done a little release date-shuffling, moving a few of their upcoming films around — most notably (and perhaps disappointingly) with The LEGO Movie 2, which was originally set to hit theaters in 2018 and will now arrive nine months later in 2019. The good news is that we still have two new LEGO Movie spinoffs coming in 2017, and Ben Affleck’s Live By Night will now hit theaters a bit earlier than expected.
We know Ben Affleck has written the script for his solo Batman movie, but the question remains, what will it be about? Will we get a story of the Dark Knight true to the comics, or something entirely new? It now looks like we’ll get a mix of both.
In another bit of news that lends credence to the rumors of tension between Zack Snyder and Warner Bros., Ben Affleck has been officially promoted from mere Batman to Executive Producer-Man on Justice League. Snyder is currently in production on the film in London, having begun less than two weeks after Patty Jenkins wrapped principal production on Wonder Woman.
When Ben Affleck took the stage at Comic-Con last year to promote Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, it was a mere matter of minutes before rumors began circulating that Warner Bros. was planning a new solo Batman film with Affleck set to star — and possibly direct. DC’s Geoff Johns confirmed that he was working on a script with Affleck, and since then the news has basically been repeatedly confirmed via interviews with Zack Snyder, Johns and Affleck. And now WB has gone and made it officially official by announcing that a standalone Batman film is in development with Affleck. But we already knew that.
Just a few hours after a report in The Hollywood Reporter claiming that Warner Bros. would be releasing fewer movies in the years ahead to focus on LEGO, Harry Potter and the DC Cinematic Universe, the studio has at least made good on one of those promises...