#Ben Affleck’s Original Plans for The Batman Revealed by Deathstroke Actor Joe Manganiello

One of the biggest disappointments for fans regarding the failure of the DCEU was Ben Affleck’s exit from the role of Batman. Before he hung up the cape and the cowl, Affleck was set to write, direct and star in The Batman. Joe Manganiello was poised to feature as the main villain Slade Wilson aka Deathstroke in the film. During an interview, Manganiello revealed what the solo Batffleck movie would have been like.

“There were similarities to [1997’s] The Game. It was a really dark story in which Deathstroke was like a shark or a horror movie villain that was dismantling Bruce’s life from the inside out. It was this systemic thing: He killed everyone close to Bruce and destroyed his life to try and make him suffer because he felt that Bruce was responsible for something that happened to him. It was really cool, really dark and really hard. I was very excited for it.”

RELATED: New Batmobile Roars in on The Batman Merch at CCXP
Filmmaker Zack Snyder was fully on board with the planned movie coming from Ben Affleck, so much so that the original “Snyder Cut” of Justice League featured an end-credits scene where Deathstroke meets up with Lex Luthor to discuss what to do with the Caped Crusader, which would have directly set up the events of The Batman. But Joe Manganiello went on to explain that after Snyder left Justice League and was replaced by Joss Whedon, the scene was reworked to set up Justice League 2 instead, teasing the arrival of Luthor’s Injustice League of supervillains.

“I thought that scene was gone, but [producer] Jon Berg called me up and said, ‘We’ve reworked the scene and put it back in. I was as surprised as anybody! They reshot all of Jesse’s dialogue to tease Justice League Part 2, which was going to be about the Injustice League. All of that dialogue was about Batman originally, and it was changed to lines like ‘Shouldn’t we have a league of our own?'”

After Snyder was brought on board this year to complete his version of Justice League for HBO Max, one of the first people he got in touch with was Manganiello, to ask if the actor was interested in reshooting the end-credits scene in the manner it was originally intended. Not only did Manganiello agree to reshoot the scene, but he added an interesting new hairstyle for Deathstroke into the mix, and hopes the finished version of the scene excites fans enough to get a full Deathstroke movie greenlit.

“There was a climatic moment in my standalone story where I wanted Slade to shave his head into this war-like Mohawk knowing that he was going off to his own death. I said to Zack, ‘I always envisioned him with a big white Mohawk,’ and he was totally down for it… Hopefully this will reinvigorate interest from the fans as far as wanting to see this version of the character get told. We landed on an origin story that everyone I’ve ever pitched it to has gone crazy for. There’s been so many versions of this character over the years, and I just wanted to put my own stink on him.”

This news was originally reported at Yahoo.com.

Topics: The Batman, Batman