Contra my tweets last night, I'm not actually that upset about the choice of Ben Affleck as Batman for the upcoming Batman vs. Superman movie. I mean, I don't think it's a great choice—my pick would've been Justified's Timothy Olyphant, but that wasn't in the cards—but you could do worse than Affleck. I guess. As you may be able to tell from the headline of this post, I'm pretty "meh" on the whole thing.
I would like to make two points, however.
First, the idea that this is some sort of desperate ploy for box office bucks by Warner Brothers is asinine. It's asinine because Ben Affleck isn't a box office draw. Look at this box office results. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Yes, Argo grossed $136M; no mean feat for an R-rated drama (even if it was also an Oscar contender, always a box office booster). But prior to that he hadn't had a movie gross more than $100M in roughly a decade (the disastrous Daredevil) and he managed to drive the Jack Ryan franchise into the ground with Sum of All Fears (though I'm happy to concede that that flick had problems aside from its lead, perhaps most noticeably its absurd decision to kowtow to the PC gods by turning Muslim terrorists into European fascists, or some such).
Affleck doesn't put butts in seats. He just doesn't.
The second point I'd like to make is that they are rushing this thing, and I'm far more worried about them rushing a shoddy script into production than I am about the clod of an actor they're putting behind the cowl. They announced a release date before they had a script (and, possibly, before they even had a story in mind). This is almost never a good sign.
Goyer and Nolan have earned our trust—remember when everyone freaked out about Heath Ledger playing the Joker? "How could he possibly fill JACK NICHOLSON'S shoes? OMG!"—but I am a little nervous.