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It’s been almost 10 years since Ben Affleck’s Batman first appeared onscreen in 2016’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice — and almost two years since his last appearance in 2023’s The Flash. Now, Affleck is looking back at his time as DC’s Dark Knight, and sharing his take on what went wrong. Basically, he believes, the Zack Snyder-led DC movies were aimed at the wrong people.

“What happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience,” Affleck argued during a recent interview with GQ. “Like even my own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie. And so when I saw that I was like, ‘Oh shit, we have a problem.’ Then I think that’s when you had a filmmaker that wanted to continue down that road and a studio that wanted to recapture all the younger audience at cross purposes. Then you have two entities, two people really wanting to do something different and that is a really bad recipe.”

It’s worth pointing out that Affleck wasn’t sparing his own contributions to these movies, either. “By the way, I wasn’t bringing anything particularly wonderful to that equation at the time, either,” he said, adding, “Part of it is that what I was bringing to work every day was a lot of unhappiness. So I wasn’t bringing a lot of positive energy to the equation. I didn’t cause problems, but I came in and I did my job and I went home. But you’ve got to do a little bit better than that.”

That intent to do better and to avoid the conflict between filmmaker and studio is what fuels his current work with production company Artists Equity, which he says is “actually a way of trying to avoid” what happened during his time as Batman. “I was to put together partnerships and filmmakers and cat and a studio apparatus that’s aligned,” he said, “where precisely that kind of misalignment doesn’t happen and you have a much better work experience.”

Quietly working to make a better world, wracked with regret about the past and his part in it? Maybe Affleck has more Batman in him than he cares to admit.

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