Despite finding the premise intriguing, Ben Affleck doesn’t look back too fondly at his DCEU days for a multitude of reasons.

The entirety of the DCEU can be summed up as wasted potential, especially when it comes to Ben Affleck’s Batman. Although on paper, the prospect of an older and broken Bruce Wayne sounds intriguing, it was the disregard for the caped crusader’s no-kill rule and the writing issues that led to the uproar against Dawn of Justice.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice | Credit: Warner Bros Pictures

As for Affleck’s experience in the shoes of the brooding vigilante, surprisingly, the actor doesn’t look too fondly at his DCEU years.

Ben Affleck was miserable during his early DCEU days

Ben Affleck as Bruce Wayne | Credit: Warner Bros.

Despite finding the initial premise of an older and damaged Batman intriguing, soon enough, Ben Affleck soon found himself between a rock and a hard place due to the stark contrast between the studio and Zack Snyder‘s vision. Even though he had no issues with Snyder, which explains their reunion for the Snyder cut, for the most part, he “wasn’t bringing anything particularly wonderful to that equation.”

Elaborating on it, he added (via GQ):

But more of my failings of, in terms of why I had a bad experience, part of it is that what I was bringing to work every day was a lot of unhappiness. So I wasn’t bringing a lot of positive energy to the equation. I didn’t cause problems, but I came in and I did my job and I went home. But you’ve got to do a little bit better than that.

It also didn’t help that many of the younger demographic, including his kid, didn’t connect with his version of the Caped Crusader, and the conflict between the suits at WB and Snyder only made things worse.

What happened was it started to skew too old for a big part of the audience. Like even my own son at the time was too scared to watch the movie. And so when I saw that I was like, ‘Oh shit, we have a problem.’

With the DCEU now long buried, Affleck has no intentions of diving back into his superhero roots due to his lack of interest in the genre.

Ben Affleck finally found his groove in The Flash

The Flash | Credit: Warner Bros.

But before the DCEU concluded, Ben Affleck did return for his swansong in The Flash, and in contrast to his early DCEU days, his brief stint in The Flash proved to be much much better, as the change of tone finally helped him to “figure out how to play that character” (via THR).

I did finally figure out how to play that character [Batman], and I nailed it in The Flash. For the five minutes I’m there, it’s really great. A lot of it’s just tone. You’ve got to figure out, what’s your version of the person? Who is the guy that fits what you can do? I tried to fit myself into a Batman

Given that he initially started off as a broken and damaged vigilante in BVS, it’s kind of poetic that this version of the Caped Crusader finally found himself in his final moments in the cinematic universe.

The Flash is available to stream on Max.