Filmmaker Kevin Smith recently revealed to Yahoo’s The Never-Weres series that he wrote a Superman film that had Ben Affleck in the lead role but failed to get it to the big screen.
At the time, both of them had just finished the successful Mallrats and Smith decided to pitch his own Superman movie after reading the Superman Reborn screenplay in production at Warner Bros.
Smith wrote the movie based on The Death of Superman comic series. It went into development with producer Jon Peters, but it all went wrong when the two fought over casting choices.
Warner Bros.
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Smith said: “I was writing it for Affleck. Ben was heating up. Like he was there. I think he’d been hired for Armageddon.”
“Affleck, he’s a f**king giant, like he’s built like a superhero, built like a giant action figure, particularly with the height. And then he puts on the muscles there too. So, in my head and heart, it was always Ben and Michael Rooker,” he explained.
Guardians of the Galaxy‘s Rooker was meant to play Lex Luthor as the rival to Affleck’s Superman, but Peters wanted to cast Sean Penn as Superman as he had just received an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.
Warner Bros.
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Smith continued: “[Jon Peters] goes, ‘Look in [Penn’s] eyes in that movie, he’s [got] haunted eyes, the eyes of a killer. And I was like, ‘Dude, it’s Superman. You know, that’s not how most people think of Superman.'”
“But he wanted to reinvent it. He wanted something gritty, graphic, and grown-up. He essentially wanted like what Zack Snyder eventually did,” referring to Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and Justice League.
Though we never got to see Affleck as Superman, he eventually played the hero Batman opposite Henry Cavill’s Superman in Batman v Superman, and will be reprising his role in The Flash, due later this year.
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