Ben Affleck Confirms He's Directing Solo BATMAN Film, Teases a Key Plot Element

If you haven't noticed, there's been an onslaught of Justice League news today as bloggers invited to the film's London set have been given the go-ahead to publish their stories about what they saw and heard there. We've written a lot about the movie already, but there's another thing that's worth talking about: notable DVD commentary track provider Ben Affleck finally, officially, confirmed that he's directing a standalone Batman movie. He's spoken about the solo film (hopefully titled The Batman) before, but always in a "here's what I would do if I were to direct this" kind of way. Now he's owning it, and teasing a little of what we can expect the tone to be. When asked why he's an executive producer on Justice League, he told Birth.Movies.Death:

Why I’m an executive producer is that I’m directing one of the movies. So there’s sort of this cross pollination of story and characters and I don’t want to give any of that stuff away, but it basically means that there are some things that might happen in my Batman that are affected by... I mean, here we are in the police station in Gotham city. There’s a potential that something like this might exist in that story. So it’s a creative way that DC came up with of kind of being a filmmaker-driven company and entity and also making sure that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing so that there’s collaboration and supervision. So that somebody doesn’t go sailing off, causing problems for your movie with their movie. You know, in a way, it’s also a kind of a courtesy. You know what they’re doing, one hand knows what the other is doing, and I get to weigh in on stuff that impacts the Batman stuff.

He also teased one key plot element that we can expect in his solo film: Batman will lean more on his detective roots than he did last time around:

It’s definitely, the world’s greatest detective aspect of Batman is more present in [Justice League] than it was in [Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice], and will probably be expanded upon further in a Batman movie that I would do. I think all the great Batman stories are, at their heart, detective stories. That’s why they feel like noir movies in a way. Somehow feels like it could be The Maltese Falcon. But at their heart good Batman stories are, like I said, detective stories.

As for when we can expect the film, Affleck doesn't commit:

I think they have a date for it. Although, I don’t know if I would necessarily be able to make that date because I don’t have a script that’s ready yet. So that’s my, my timetable is I’m not going to make a movie until there’s a script that I think is good because I’ve been on the end of the things when you make movies when you have a script that’s not good yet and it doesn’t pan out. [laughs]

But where is he currently in the writing process?

I have a script, we’re still working on it, and I’m not happy enough with it yet to actually go out there and make a Batman movie, for which I have the highest of standards, I would say. That’s something that would have to pass a very high bar for me. It’s not just like, “Yeah, that might be fun, let’s go try this out.”

Affleck reportedly has full creative control over his movie, so I'm very excited to see what he does with it. Now we just need to wait and see if he can perfect the script in time to hit WB's mysterious release date.