ben affleck

'I'm lucky to have the love of my family and friends,' Affleck said in an emotional post.

They couple first announced they'd split in June 2015.

The couple first announced they were splitting in 2015.

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.

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.

I‘ve never seen 75 million dollars. It’s more than I have ever had, will ever have, and in all likelihood, more than I will cumulatively earn over the course of my entire life. I can’t really even conceive of how much money that is, the buying power it represents. So the news that Ben Affleck singlehandedly lost $75,000,000 for Warner Bros. with his pricy and apparently unappealing Live By Night has been kind of hard to process. Why doesn’t he have to go to jail? How is he allowed to continue directing movies? This defies all the laws of Monopoly, my lone primer on the ins and outs of macroeconomics.

To celebrate the birthday of DC’s Geoff Johns, Joe Manganiello has shared a new photo of Deathstroke, and it’s…a little blurry. In case you’d forgotten, the actor is playing the Batman villain in Ben Affleck’s solo film, simply titled The Batman — but we might get a peek at the baddie in action a little sooner than that, as Deathstroke is rumored to be making a brief appearance in Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

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.

After years of watching a certain segment of fans argue over which Enterprise captain was the best, I think it might be time for Star Trek fans to admit that they’re no longer the leader in casting fan arguments. Now all the cool kids want to argue over which Batman actor played the role best. While the obvious answer for most millennials would be Christian Bale, I tend to gravitate towards the early performances of Michael Keaton, a Batman who was a bit more believable as an intellectual than subsequent versions of the character. To each their own, I suppose.

Ben Affleck is frustrated. And who could blame him? Anyone who dons Batman’s iconic cape and mask is immediately the center of superhero fans’ attention, both positive and negative. But Affleck doesn’t just want to live in a Batman bubble and only be asked about Batman. (Valid, but what did you expect dude?)

'I was a little taken aback. That's not the kind of thing I would do,' Ben said on 'Jimmy Kimmel Live.'