Ben Affleck's THE BATMAN Is Compared to David Fincher’s THE GAME by Joe Manganiello

As many of you already know, before director Matt Reeves took on The Batman for Warner Bros. and DC, Ben Affleck was set to develop and direct his own version of the story. A lot of fans have been curious about what that version of the story would have been like.

Well, during a recent interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Joe Manganiello, who plays DC assassin Slade Wilson, a.k.a. Deathstroke in the DCEU, discussed Affleck’s vision of Batman and explained that it would have had a strong David Fincher vibe. In fact, he compares it to Fincher’s 1997 film The Game, saying that there are similarities.

The original pitch for The Batman saw Deathstroke systematically destroying Bruce Wayne’s life, his public status as Gotham City’s leading citizen, and his private existence as Batman. Manganiello went on to say:

“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.”

Manganiello was very excited about the film adding, “It was really cool, really dark and really hard. I was very excited for it. Director Zack Snyder was excited about it as well and even set up the story for it in the original version of a post-credits scene at the end of Justice League where Deathstroke pays a visit to Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor.”

While I would have liked to see this movie get made, I’m still excited for Reeves’s upcoming The Batman, which opens in theaters on March 4, 2022.

What do you think about what Manganiello had to say about Affleck’s Batman movie?