“Him being taken off that movie, and the reshoots that we did–if you want the low point of my career, it was that.” Ben Affleck was talking about Zack Snyder’s exit from Justice League and the 2017 reshoots that followed, in a conversation with Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that began circulating on October 12. Asked about the solo Batman film he never made, Affleck said he “loved playing” the character but called the experience around the ensemble film “so, so negative for lots of different reasons.”
His sharpest words were for the studio. Snyder stepped back from the production in May 2017 after the death of his daughter, Autumn, and Joss Whedon took over, with two months of extra filming in London and Los Angeles announced that July. Affleck separated the grief from the business decision. “Somebody’s death by suicide, that eclipses everything,” he said. “And the way that was, I thought, frankly, used as an excuse…” A moment later: “It was so gross.”
He also drew a practical lesson about filmmaking, saying the job showed him “how not to make a movie like that when the studio is at odds with the filmmaker.” And he tied the period to his own health. “And I was drinking too much,” he said. “That’s when I started to feel like, ‘I’d like to quit drinking, and I’m having a hard time not drinking.'”
The same story, told more bluntly
None of this is entirely new from Affleck. In a 2023 interview he described the shoot as “the worst experience I’ve ever seen in a business which is full of some s—ty experiences,” recalled his nights in a London hotel and said, “This isn’t the life I want. My kids aren’t here. I’m miserable,” and said the film left a “monstrous taste” that ended his plan to direct his own Batman picture.
What has changed is the target. Three years ago the emphasis was on his own unhappiness and his drinking. This time he points at the decision-makers, and at the handling of a family tragedy, for wrecking the film.
Affleck’s Batman decade, by the numbers
The casting itself was contested from the start, drawing online petitions from comic fans before Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice arrived on March 25, 2016. His performance was later praised even though the film was not. Then the slide:
- March 2016: Batman v Superman takes $874.4 million worldwide, $330.4 million of it in North America.
- Later in 2016: The Accountant becomes a surprise commercial hit, while Live by Night, which he wrote and directed, fails to earn back a $65 million budget.
- November 17, 2017: Justice League opens in the US. It ends on $661.3 million worldwide against an estimated $300 million budget, with $229 million from North America.
- 2021: Zack Snyder’s Justice League, the director’s cut, reaches HBO Max with a newly shot Affleck scene.
- 2023: A final Batman cameo in The Flash, and Air, his fifth film as director.
Our arithmetic shows how steep the drop was. In North America, $330.4 million minus $229 million leaves a gap of $101.4 million, so Justice League earned about 31% less there than its predecessor. Worldwide, $874.4 million against $661.3 million is a fall of $213.1 million, or roughly 24%.
Away from the cape, his record looks very different. He shared the original screenplay Oscar for Good Will Hunting with Matt Damon at 25, and his 2012 film Argo won Best Picture with Affleck directing. He walked away from directing and starring in The Batman amid an alcoholism relapse, saying he “couldn’t crack it.” The Accountant 2 followed in 2025.
His next film as director, Animals, a kidnapping thriller in which he stars opposite Gillian Anderson, is headed to Netflix, the company that in March 2026 bought his AI post-production startup, InterPositive, for an estimated $600 million.
Further reading
- Wikipedia: Ben Affleck
- Wikipedia: Justice League (film)
- Wikipedia: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
