Deathstroke Will Reportedly Be The Main Villain in Ben Affleck's Solo Batman Film

Early this morning, Ben Affleck shared a video of some live-action footage featuring the villainous assassin Deathstroke on his Twitter page. The majority of the speculation online pointed toward this footage being from Justice League, and that still may be the case. But Justice League may not be the only appearance in the DC Extended Universe from the one-eyed badass: The Wrap reports that "Deathstroke will, in fact, be the main antagonist of the Batman standalone movie [Affleck is] directing."

The report claims they heard this information from "an individual with knowledge of the situation," but since it's not corroborated by multiple sources and it's still very early on in the script process for The Batman (or whatever it ends up being called), I'm not quite sure that I totally buy this. Sure, it's plausible. DC has shown that they're willing to drop their characters into other movies to give the cinematic universe a feeling of connectedness (see: The Flash and Batman in Suicide Squad), and I wouldn't be surprised if Deathstroke pops up to go toe to toe with The Dark Knight in the solo movie. But the primary antagonist? I don't know...maybe it was getting burned after all of the talk about how Deathstroke was going to show up in Suicide Squad (he didn't), most of which originated with the same Wrap reporter who's putting forth this story now. He was so certain Deathstroke was going to have the "breakout" role in that movie. I know things it's common for things to change during pre-production and even during production on big superhero movies these days, but that's exactly why I'm skeptical of this announcement this early on. There's just too much time for things to change.

I think I'm just going to need to hear this from more than just one person before I start entertaining the notion of an entire movie being based around the conflict between Batman and Deathstroke.