Ben Affleck

Class is in session. Sadly, legions of kids know this to be true, as they begin to head back to school for another year of filling their brains with knowledge.

Rough day to be Ben Affleck, the kind of day that makes you just wanna get away from it all by sneaking into your car and having a quick sad-vape. His performance as Batman has begun to emerge the fanbase’s most-loathed, and to add insult to injury, he was ousted from the director’s chair on upcoming solo film The Batman. Now, even more insult has been added to that injury, as replacement director Matt Reeves has begun to clean house and get himself comfy in a new franchise.

Today’s rumor is somewhat out of left field, and yet entire plausible once you consider it: According to a suspicious tweet posted by Josh Gad, the actor and recent star of Beauty and the Beast might be playing The Penguin in The Batman. And while an actor sharing a photo of a fictional character seemingly at random could mean just about anything, there is some additional evidence to support his potential involvement.

A new Batman vehicle demands, in a more literal sense, a new Batman vehicle. As Ben Affleck prepares to don the cape and cowl once more to reprise the role of Bruce Wayne in Zack Snyder’s upcoming Justice League movie, modifications have also been made to his singular whip, the teched-out Batmobile. Snyder applied his bigger-is-better filmmaking ethic to the Batmobile in last year‘s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, diverging from Christopher Nolan’s utilitarian, industrial look towards something a little more tanklike. And today, Snyder’s taken to his favored social media channel of Vero to offer fans an advance look at what the latest edition of the Batmobile has to offer.

After a brief and weirdly intense game of will they / won’t they, it looks like Matt Reeves will direct The Batman for Warner Bros. and Ben Affleck. Following reports late last week that negotiations had broken down between the Planet of the Apes director and the studio comes a reversal, as Reeves has officially signed on to helm the upcoming solo Bat-project, which was previously intended as a directing vehicle for Affleck himself.

Like any job, writing about the latest news in the world of entertainment can wear on you after long enough, so you gotta appreciate the little pearls of amusement where you can get them. Personally, watching the latest solo Batman project fall apart in slow motion has been a perverse thrill over the past couple of months: star Ben Affleck was gonna direct (maybe) the film titled The Batman, then he was definitely gonna direct it, then he backpedaled a little bit, then he requested that people stop asking him about it, then he face-planted onto the sidewalk with the costly flop Live By Night, and then look at that, he wasn’t taking the director’s chair after all. The indignities kept coming, as Warner Bros. ordered sweeping rewrites to this floundering project before landing Planet of the Apes remake maestro Matt Reeves to fill the directorial vacuum.

A story, told in headlines: Here’s us on December 18, reporting on Ben Affleck’s voicing of slight misgivings about his tentative gig as the director of the new Batman solo film:

I‘ve never seen 75 million dollars. It’s more than I have ever had, will ever have, and in all likelihood, more than I will cumulatively earn over the course of my entire life. I can’t really even conceive of how much money that is, the buying power it represents. So the news that Ben Affleck singlehandedly lost $75,000,000 for Warner Bros. with his pricy and apparently unappealing Live By Night has been kind of hard to process. Why doesn’t he have to go to jail? How is he allowed to continue directing movies? This defies all the laws of Monopoly, my lone primer on the ins and outs of macroeconomics.

Rough year for Ben Affleck, noted Jennifer Garner spouse and one-time star of Gigli. His big starring vehicle Batman v Superman made a whole lot of money but was critically reviled almost across the board, his latest directorial effort Live by Night got a quiet and unceremonious limited release that was buried in the holiday craziness, he was spotted sadly vaping in a car, and now a pall of uncertainty has been cast over his future. He’s confirmed for Zack Snyder’s upcoming Justice League crossover, but Affleck’s relationship with the Dark Knight’s cowl and cape may be getting a bit strained. In a new interview, Affleck indicated that what was once presumed to be set in stone is, in fact, still up for debate.

We all know that Ben Affleck’s performance as Batman was one of the few things both critics and fans of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice could completely agree on. From his shallow playboy persona as Bruce Wayne to his thinly veiled rage as the Dark Knight, Affleck’s take on the character got everyone very excited to see what the actor-writer-director could do with a free hand for his standalone The Batman movie. Unfortunately, things have slowed considerably since, with rumors of mediocre scripts and a shifting release date taking some of the buzz off the upcoming release.