Six years after Ben Affleck stepped away from directing and starring in his own Batman film, a key member of DC‘s extended universe has now been speaking about what audiences could have expected from a “Batfleck” feature film—and it sounds as if it would have taken the Dark Knight in a direction not seen before on the big screen.

Affleck had taken the step to remove himself from the project, entitled The Batman, due to personal reasons, having been experiencing the end of his marriage at the time. In an interview from 2020 with the New York Times, Affleck opened up on his struggles: “I showed somebody The Batman script,” he said. “They said, ‘I think the script is good. I also think you’ll drink yourself to death if you go through what you just went through again.”

Jay Oliva, a storyboard artist working on the DCEU and a director of animated films like The Dark Knight Returns and Flashpoint Paradox, was involved in-depth on a number of DC projects, both successful and canned, and has been speaking to Inverse about the failed Affleck project, despite being unable to go into details.

“I can’t really say too much other than it was fucking awesome. It was the best. It was amazing. From my understanding, there were a couple of drafts of it. When I was brought on, I don’t know whether it was the second draft or something, but it was what Geoff Johns and Ben [Affleck] had shown me.

“I’ve worked on a lot of Batman things and what was really cool about it was, it was tying together a lot of really cool Batman storylines that had never been really explored. Ben’s story was gonna cover something that had never really been covered in comics but was building off of storylines in the Batman mythos over the last 80 years and approaching it from a new kind of perspective.”

The best Batman films had always been adapted from the iconic runs in the comics, but it sounds like this film would have tried to do something new with the story, which will unfortunately never see the light of day.

“It was very clever and there were a lot of things about it that I really loved that I wish that had come to fruition,” Oliva added. “It was a really great project in the beginning. Ben had to step away for personal reasons, and I totally understood, but the time that I spent with Ben working on the project was fantastic. Maybe someday I can spill the beans, but I still can’t talk about it.”

Affleck would go on to play Bruce Wayne a final time in 2023’s The Flash, before being replaced in Barry Allen (Ezra Miller)’s timeline by George Clooney, another former Caped Crusader. Robert Pattinson went on to play the role of Bruce Wayne in a retooled version of The Batman, which was directed by Matt Reeves and released to critical and commercial success in 2022.

via Collider