One of the greatest Batman stories to be cancelled Ben Affleck’s Batman Vs Deathstroke should be one of the projects which Discovery should bring back from the list of cancelled list from the previous DC regime.
Watch: Batman Vs Deathstroke in Arkham origins
Batman Vs Deathstroke fight sequences inspired from the games
A plot very famous from the Arkham Knight games, Ben Affleck’s movie was supposed to be a battle of wits and strength against Joe Manganiello’s Deathstroke. The movie would be about Slade Wilson, aka Deathstroke, taking revenge on Batman after he learns that an event caused by the Dark Knight escalates to the point of Wilson’s son getting killed in the process. He becomes Deathstroke and takes an oath to seek revenge for his son.
The insane plot
Deathstroke then teams up with Jared Leto’s joker and destroys Bruce Wayne’s personal life bit by bit causing him to go insane. It is even believed that there was a draft in which Deathstroke kills Batman’s loyal butler Alfred in his thirst for vengeance. The movie would have featured an epic fight sequence which would culminate the ending.
In the original pitch for The Batman vs Deathstroke, Slade performed a demolition job on Bruce Wayne’s life, systematically destroying his public status as Gotham City’s leading citizen and his private existence as its Caped Crusader. Joe Manganiello says, “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.” Deathstroke kills everyone close to Bruce and destroys his life to try and make him suffer. Because he felt that Bruce was responsible for his suffering.
The cast is too perfect to let this project stall
All in all, it seems like a fantastic plot that never got to see the light of day. Ben Affleck’s directing skills are often overlooked but he is an excellent director delivering intense movies. His best one yet is Argo for which he won an oscar. Ben Affleck as Batman, Joe Manganiello as Deathstroke, and Jared Leto as Joker seem too good in their roles without a proper Batman movie.
Ben Affleck’s vision for Batman deserves to be seen
While other Batman movies have come and go with their different approaches to the Dark Knight, we have yet to see a proper Gotham-based movie featuring the rogues from Arkham Asylum, which this movie was planning to do. And while we have yet to see how Robert Pattinson does with his Batman, it is a safe bet to assume he won’t have the same oomph as what Ben Affleck had in his fight scenes. Ben Affleck’s fight scene in Batman Vs Superman in the warehouse where he beats all those thugs is singlehandedly the best Batman fight sequence out there. Not even Christian Bale had a fight scene like that in his three movies.
With the movie being a continuation of what Ben Affleck and Zack Snyder set out to do with their Batman, this is too good a project to be cancelled. When Discovery comes in Batman Vs Deathstroke is one of the first projects that should be greenlit alongside the big one- Zack Snyder’s Justice League trilogy.
