Ben Affleck’s axed Batman movie was “really cool, really dark and really hard”

Joe Manganiello was set to play Deathstroke in Ben Affleck’s axed Batman movie (and will play him again in the Snyder Cut). He remembers what almost was.

The DCEU has gone through some major changes (understatement of the decade) over the last few years. Justice League was supposed to kick off a glorious new era for the franchise, but it didn’t go as planned, with one of the pillars of the new team — Ben Affleck as Batman — retiring from the role not long after.

That also meant that Affleck wouldn’t be starring and directing his own solo Batman movie, with Robert Pattinson stepping into the retooled role instead. And a whole new era once again begun.

But memories remain. Joe Manganiello, who was set to play assassin Slade Wilson, aka Deathstroke, looked back on the cancelled film while talking to Yahoo Entertainment. According to him, the movie “was really cool, really dark and really hard.”

"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."

The movie would have followed a classic arc from Frank Miller’s time on Marvel’s Daredevil comic. Part of it was adapted in the third season of Netflix’s Daredevil show, but just imagine how cool it would have been to see it on the big screen.

Joe Manganiello was extremely excited to take part in Affleck’s Batman film; he even got to appear in a post-credits scene at the end of Justice League.

Speaking of Justice League, director Zach Snyder is releasing his own, much-expanded cut of the movie on HBO Max next year, and happily, Manganiello’s Deathstroke is a part of it. “Zack called me one day and asked, ‘How’d you like to do it again?’ So I said, ‘Sure, man, I’ll be there.’ And he told me, ‘OK, we’re getting your armor out of storage in England, and we’re going to fly it over here. Is there anything you want to do differently?”

"Some of those elements I snuck into this round. The greatest warriors are the ones who walk into battle already dead or assuming that they’re going to die — they’re looking for someone who could actually kill them. There’s almost an excitement around that, like ‘Is today going to be the day?’ So 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."

We even know what that’ll look like:

If the Snyder Cut is a success, there may even be hope for Deathstroke to turn up in later DCEU movies! “Hopefully, this will reinvigorate interest from the fans as far as wanting to see this version of the character get told,” Manganiello said. “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.”

Here’s to more Deathstroke in our future!

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h/t SYFY Wire