As Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice director Zack Snyder continues to share black-and-white photos from his time in The DCEU to his recently-created Instagram account, this latest shot features a never-before-seen look at Ben Affleck as "Knightmare" Batman
"Bruce Wayne, on the run in a broken future—hunted by Parademons and you know who. A world lost. A last gamble. One chance to send Flash back and reset everything. From Zack Snyder’s Justice League—the nightmare timeline where hope is almost extinct," the filmmaker captioned his post.
Affleck's Caped Crusader appeared alongside several other characters, including Deathstroke (Joe Manganiello), Cyborg (Ray Fisher) and The Joker (Jared Leto), in the post-credits scene of Snyder's director's cut of Justice League. This storyline would have continued if Snyder had been given the opportunity to return to helm a sequel, which obviously didn't happen.
The #RestoreTheSnyderVerse faithful believed that there might be something to Snyder sharing these photos, and remain hopeful that the filmmaker will step behind the camera for another DC Comics-based film at some point. But at this stage, we can't imagine there's much more to this than Snyder sharing some of his favorite work to his new Instagram account (though we're sure he's aware of the attention the pics have been getting).
James Gunn and Zack Snyder have been in contact since the news that the DCEU was being rebooted as the DCU was announced, but the chances of the latter returning to the fold seem pretty slim. Still, the fact that Gunn and DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran will continue to develop Elseworlds projects means we can't completely rule anything out.
“You know, I’m a pretty open book. I really feel like, you know, if the characters are treated with reverence, and mythologically correct, then I’m down. I’m in,” Snyder said when asked about the DCU relaunch last year. “Let’s see what happens. I’m pretty excited. I mean, we’re going to get Superman pretty soon, so we’ll see what that’s like.”
When asked on Threads if he'd seen Snyder's comments about being "excited for the DCU," Gunn responded: “I didn’t, but I knew it already because he’s texted me. He’s been incredibly supportive throughout this process."
"I had a really good time. I loved doing the Batman movie. I loved Batman v Superman," Affleck said during a recent interview when asked about his experience playing Batman. "And I liked my brief stints on The Flash that I did and when I got to work with Viola Davis on Suicide Squad for a day or two." "In terms of creatively, I really think that I like the idea and the ambition that I had for it, which was of the sort of older, broken, damaged Bruce Wayne. And it was something we really went for in the first movie. 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.'"
"Then I think that’s when you had a filmmaker that wanted to continue down that road and a studio that wanted to recapture all the younger audience at cross purposes."