The Batman actor also revealed the Warner Bros. drama killed his plans for a solo Batman film built around Joe Manganiello's Deathstroke.
Ben Affleck isn't holding back on Justice League anymore. Nearly a decade after the film limped into theatres, the actor told the Happy Sad Confused podcast that the reshoot period was, in his words, "the low point of my career."
He wasn't talking about box office. He was talking about what happened on set and behind it.
For anyone who's forgotten the mess: Zack Snyder stepped away from Justice League during post-production after his daughter died by suicide. Warner Bros. Brought in Joss Whedon to run two months of reshoots that reworked the film's tone and story. Affleck says using that tragedy as the opening to take the movie away from Snyder was one of the ugliest things he's witnessed in the business.
"The way in which that was, I thought, used as an excuse was one of the shittiest things I've ever seen," Affleck said, according to JoBlo. "It was so gross."
He added that he'd heard secondhand, mostly from castmates, that the atmosphere during those reshoots was bad. IGN reported Affleck specifically referenced accounts he'd gotten from Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot about their experience on set.
Affleck is careful to separate the professional disaster from his personal one, even though both were happening at once. He was going through a divorce around that time and has spoken before about drinking heavily during that stretch. On the podcast, he said those personal struggles were painful but didn't shape how the movie turned out. The real damage, he argued, came from a studio at war with its own director.
"I saw how not to make a movie like that, which is where the studio is at odds with the filmmaker," he said. "You are really making a mistake."
There's a bigger loss buried in here too. Affleck confirmed the Justice League fallout is what killed his own standalone Batman project, a film he was set to direct, write and star in, with Joe Manganiello cast as Deathstroke. He told the podcast he'd been excited about what he was building for that movie before the DCEU chaos soured him on helming anything else in the universe. He eventually handed the cowl, and the franchise, to Matt Reeves and Robert Pattinson, returning only briefly for new Snyder Cut scenes and a cameo in The Flash.
Justice League made $661 million worldwide against a reported $300 million budget, numbers that read as a bomb for a film stacked with that many DC heroes. Warner Bros. Rebounded the next year with Aquaman crossing $1.1 billion, but by most accounts the DCEU never really recovered its footing after 2017.
Affleck is currently dealing with a rougher reception of a different kind. Animals, the Netflix film he directed, co-wrote, produced and stars in, landed to mixed reviews this month, with JoBlo calling it uncharacteristically flat for a director whose track record includes Gone Baby Gone, The Town and Argo. Whether that changes how Affleck talks about his next project remains to be seen.
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