Ben Affleck

This new international trailer for Justice League isn’t nearly as long as the domestic trailers, but the latest sneak peek at Zack Snyder’s ambitious superhero team-up should hold you over until the next full-length preview drops. And despite its compact runtime, it does feature a little bit of new footage while teasing the mysterious new villain that will bring these heroic titans together, all set to a generic heavy rock cover of The Beatles’ “Come Together” that was clearly lifted from Snyder’s iPod circa 2001.

When we last left the caped crusader, things weren’t looking all that bright. Sure, he had a new super-friend in the form of Diana Prince, but Superman — the complete-stranger-turned-mortal-enemy-turned-best-friend in Batman’s life — has sacrificed his life to protect Earth (or something) and now the weight of protecting our planet rested heavily on the shoulders of Bruce Wayne. If Wayne could organize others like him, then maybe Earth could stand a fighting chance.

So, The Batman. Is it happening? Will we ever see it? Is Ben Affleck second-guessing his decision to join the Snyderverse? It seems every time we talk about this movie another doomsday scenario (no pun intended) is right over the horizon. It did finally acquire a new director — Matt Reeves has officially signed on after a short little negotiating game — but production is still, as far as we know, halted.

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.

Someone light the Batsignal again, it looks like The Batman is in need of another new director. A week after he was tapped to helm Ben Affleck’s solo Batman movie, Matt Reeves wants out. He’s exited the talks and is hard at work on post-production on War for the Planet of the Apes.

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.

These are dark days for the Dark Knight.

We ranked 75 years of Batman movies in one list.

With Ben Affleck no longer directing the solo Batman movie (guess he finally watched Live by Night, huh?), the search is on for a new director to take his place. Amid various reports regarding Affleck’s exit from the director’s chair was an interesting tidbit of news you might have missed: The screenplay for The Batman, penned by Affleck with DC’s own Geoff Johns, received a rewrite from Chris Terrio.

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:

As is tradition, the night before the Oscar ceremony takes place, the 37th Annual Golden Raspberry Awards will descend on Los Angeles to commemorate the worst that Hollywood had to offer in 2016. A mean-spirited diss-fest in the estimation of some, a good-natured ribbing to others, the so-called Razzies are twice as unpredictable and ten times as frank as the usual awards program. The expected categories of Worst Picture, Worst Director and Worst Actor/Actress share space with the distinctions of Worst Screen Combo and Worst Prequel, Remake, Ripoff, or Sequel at the ignominious ceremony. Some celebrities take the jokes in stride (Sandra Bullock famously showed up to receive her Worst Actress Razzie for All About Steve the day before she dropped by the Oscars to pick up her Best Actress prize for The Blind Side), but the program goes widely ignored by the industry overall.