The biggest news to hit the web today is that Oscar winner Ben Affleck is to the new Batman. This news has caused the web to implode with hatred against this choice.
Ben, if you remember, has already played a comic super hero before.
it is quite a while ago – a decade in fact. That time he played the Marvel hero, Daredevil. That also caused a massive amount of scorn from the message boards. Remember that was a time before twitter so a lot of the scorn was hidden away.
I seem to be not the only person who was shocked when I heard the news that Ben had been cast. I can’t say it’s a miss of epic proportions that some people have been going on about – or I assume so as I can’t be arsed to check that fact.
I wasn’t a big fan of the choice of Henry Cavill as Superman in the current set of Superman reboots. On the other hand this could be a great idea from the Studio with getting two of the greatest super-heroes together on screen as is what some fans have wanted for years.
My take, on the other hand, after many years seeing great film ideas being destroyed in the bureaucracy of Hollywood or studios being lazy and knowing that if they make a film with a DC, or Marvel, character in it they will make millions and millions of dollars no matter how crummy the script is. So with that out of the way, I do think that it’s not going to be a great film but it will have enough destruction to keep some fans happy and clean up in Summer 2015 assuming that there isn’t another Iron Man, Avengers or Star Wars to get in the way!
Since Ben played Daredevil, he has got better as an actor and more so as a director. Some people have said that he should be directing the film and not Zack Snyder. I don’t think this is right as Ben does good drama, that makes people think and not showing off how big an explosion you can make inside a computer!
The only thing I could expect to come out of this film until the real PR effort starts is how much it will cost. I wouldn’t be surprised if we start hearing budget numbers of $300 million or more.
It wouldn’t have mattered who was chosen as somebody would have hated the idea. This has been going on since the first, modern, Batman film came out in 1989 with Michael Keaton as the Batman. Some things never change. Whoever is chosen the fanboys will go nuts and hate the choice to start with. This then becomes a love affair with the choice. “Who thought that making Ben Affleck Batman would be a bad idea.“. This should kick in sometime around, I would suggest, Arpil 2014 when the first images appear from the film. This will change back to hatred when the first teaser trailer hits sometime in early 2015. The reason we will hate the choice again is mainly due to the lack of footage of that character in comparison to Super Man.
