Nine years after superhero epic Justice League arrived in cinemas, there ought to be very little left to say about how it all went wrong. Zack Snyder shot the film, Joss Whedon substantially rewrote and reshot it, and audiences eventually got to see both men’s versions. Any debate over their relative merits long ago disappeared. Whedon is pretty much cancelled; Snyder has reinvented himself as the writer-director of extremely average ersatz Star Wars movies for Netflix, and an entirely new DC universe is under way that has very little to do with either of them.
To a greater or lesser extent, the world has moved on. But Ben Affleck’s latest comments raise an uncomfortable question about whether Snyder’s departure was ever presented honestly. Speaking to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Affleck, who played Batman, described the Justice League reshoots as the lowest point of his career, but reserved his strongest criticism for the circumstances of Snyder’s departure. The director stepped away in May 2017, two months after his daughter Autumn killed herself, aged 20, with the public explanation that he needed to be with his family. Affleck, however, alleged that studio Warner Bros had used the tragedy to justify replacing him. “The way in which that was, I thought, used as an excuse was one of the shittiest things I’ve ever seen,” Affleck said. “It was so gross.”
In July 2020 another Justice League actor, Ray Fisher (who played Cyborg), accused Whedon of abusive and unprofessional behaviour, prompting WarnerMedia to launch an investigation into the film’s production. In December 2020, the company announced the probe had concluded and said that unspecified “remedial action” had been taken. In May 2021, Gal Gadot (who played Wonder Woman) said Whedon had “threatened her career” during production of the film. Whedon denied both allegations in January 2022, but has been largely absent from Hollywood since.
Affleck stressed that much of what he knew about his co-stars’ experiences came secondhand. His reaction was blunt: “Wow. This is about as gross as it gets.” On Snyder eventually releasing his own version (a four-hour-plus extended take that became a draw for Warner’s fledgling HBO Max streaming platform after a fierce social media campaign by Snyder fans), he added: “That was fucking great. I was really happy for him.”
This is a story that seems to shift and morph the more time passes. Initially, the baton being passed from Snyder to Whedon was framed as a mercy, though there were rumours as early as February 2018 that Snyder might have been forced out for creative reasons. Now, almost a decade on, the film’s biggest star feels comfortable alleging that Warners used a family death to justify bringing in Whedon, who at the time was one of the biggest names in superhero movies (having overseen Marvel’s early Avengers films), but whose breezy, wisecracking writing style couldn’t have been further from Snyder’s furrow-browed, heavy-metal film-making. Warners had spent years allowing Snyder to turn its superheroes into tormented deities, then developed an urgent concern that none of them knew how to do banter.
If what actually happened matters, in 2026, it’s because this was the moment that the DC extended universe (DCEU) really began to enter its death spiral. Snyder had probably already lost the confidence of studio executives after 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice tanked with critics, but audiences had still flocked to see that movie to the tune of $874m at the global box office. If a Snyder-led Justice League had reached cinemas in 2017 and proved a hit, it’s not impossible to imagine Warners allowing him to continue his vision for the future of the comic book studio. While the director of Watchmen wasn’t exactly the Kevin Feige of DC, he controlled the general direction of travel as the guy who oversaw its highest-profile ensemble efforts. After Justice League, the DCEU’s films crossed $500m at the worldwide box office only once, with 2018’s Aquaman. Somewhere along the way, the promise that everything was connected had become a warning that you might need to slog through another one.
The decline, to be fair, cannot all be blamed on one disastrous handover: the pandemic alone was probably responsible for at least some of the dramatic downturn in the DCEU’s fortunes after 2018. Nor does it follow that Snyder would have necessarily delivered a triumphant decade of superbly interconnected superhero cinema if everyone had simply left him to get on with it. His films could be ponderous, self-important and oddly embarrassed by the possibility that being Superman might occasionally be enjoyable. I’m not sure I even want to visit the alternative universe in which this grand plan actually came to fruition but it seems like a lot of DC fans at the time did.
Instead, Batman and Superman discovered themselves trapped in a universe whose supreme beings could create entire galaxies but found it impossible to agree on the appropriate number of jokes. Affleck’s comments bring us back to the human cost of all that studio indecision. Nine years on, DC has built a new universe, but still struggles to explain what happened to the old one.
