Batman Solo Movie Brouhaha: Lots of Caped Crusader Rumors Flying Around

Is Ben Affleck still playing Batman? Has Casey Affleck crossed the line in an entirely new area? Is this Batman solo movie a part of the DCEU? All this and more will be sussed out. Lots of news has broken recently involving the first solo Batman movie since The Dark Knight Rises. Lots of rumors are flying around and we need to pump the brakes and look at some of the things being discussed here.

Is Ben Affleck Still Playing Batman?

The answer to this one is, "it depends whom you ask." If you ask Affleck himself—as he was very pointedly asked at SDCC last month—he'll tell you that he's the only Batman in town. If you ask his brother, Casey Affleck, however, you get quite a different answer.

The recently anointed Best Actor winner dropped by WEEI's Dale & Holley With Keefe radio show and said that his brother was done playing Batman. Via The Hollywood Reporter...

"I thought he was an OK Batman," Casey said. "No, he was great. He was great. He's a hero, so he had something to channel and work with there. But he's not going to do that movie [The Batman], I don't think. Sorry to say."

When the interviewers reacted with shock, Affleck attempted to walk the statement back.

"Is that breaking news? Because I was just kind of making that up, I don't know," he said.

The following day, the younger Affleck had his comments clarified by a statement he released to BuzzFeed...

he [Casey Affleck] was having fun with the folks at the Red Sox game — where he threw out the first pitch in support of the Jimmy Fund — and not speaking from a place of firsthand knowledge.

What's awesome about that statement is that he basically openly admits to being drunk when he said that. If "having fun with the folks at the Red Sox game" means anything at all, it means he was three sheets to the wind. So, basically, he got drunk, spoiled a family secret, and then attempts to walk it all back in a last minute bid to save face... by admitting he was drunk. God love this family. 

Is Matt Reeves' The Batman Part of the DCEU or Not?

So with all of this "will he, won't he" talk going on over Affleck himself, the movie in question seems to find itself suddenly sitting at the kids table while the grown-ups are talking about grown-up things. When last we heard, War for the Planet of the Apes director Matt Reeves was set to direct a movie titled The Batman, that would continue the adventures of the previously established new Caped Crusader as seen in Batman v Superman.

Then Reeves chucked the film's original script by Ben Affleck and Geoff Johns—which turned Joe Manganiello's Deathstroke, the film's lead villain, into a gigantic question mark. Then Affleck tells the fans at SDCC that he loves Reeves' take on the material and he couldn't be happier to make the movie. 

Yesterday, word broke that DC was going to have a splinter division in its film production starting with a Joker origin film directed by Todd Phillips and produced by Martin Scorsese. This wasn't going to be tied into the existing DCEU where Jared Leto is regrettably the face of the character at the moment. Following this revelation, word almost immediately follows that Matt Reeves' The Batman is going to be one of those movies as well, i.e. not tied to the DCEU where Ben Affleck is the face of the character.

That's right, while appearing on the podcast The Business, Reeves said flat-out that his film is not tied to the existing continuity where Batman is a murderous savage played by Ben Affleck. 

“Well, I have a vision for a way to do something with that character that feels like it resonates with me personally, and a perspective that can grow out into other things. When they [Warner Bros.] approached me, what they said was ‘look, it’s a standalone, it’s not part of the extended universe.'”

So what's going on here? The question I'm left with is "Who is playing Batman and in what movie is that going to be?" I didn't think that would be such a difficult question to answer but it's proven itself quite the pickle. Someone wake me when all this blows over and I have an answer to that question.