Snyder fans always blamed Warner Bros. for Justice League — now Ben Affleck says they were right
Affleck saves his strongest words not for Joss Whedon, but for the way Warner Bros. explained Zack Snyder's exit.
Ben Affleck has called the Justice League reshoots the low point of his career. Talking to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast while promoting Animals, the Netflix thriller he directed and stars in, which landed on 9 October 2026, he went further than he ever has about how Zack Snyder was replaced by Joss Whedon in 2017, and about who he thinks was really to blame.
"Boy, that was shitty, [Zack Snyder] being taken off that movie and the reshoots we did… If you want the low point of my career, it was that."
— Ben Affleck, on Happy Sad Confused
The short version of his answer: not Snyder, not Whedon, and not the divorce or the drinking Affleck has talked about before. The studio.
The excuse
Snyder left Justice League during post-production in 2017, after his 20-year-old daughter, Autumn, died by suicide. Warner Bros.' official line at the time was that he was stepping away to be with his family. Whedon, fresh off two Avengers films, came in to write and shoot new material. Snyder later estimated the reshoots ran to 60 new pages.
For years a very loud corner of the internet insisted the tragedy had been a convenient exit door for a studio that already wanted Snyder out. Affleck now says the same thing, with his name on it. A death by suicide, he told Horowitz, "eclipses everything", and the way it was used as an excuse to replace Snyder was "one of the shittiest things I've ever seen".
The man who played Batman just put his name to the theory the studio spent years treating as a fan conspiracy.
He also admitted much of what went on during the reshoots reached him secondhand, through the experiences of Ray Fisher, Gal Gadot and others. His reaction, as he remembers it: "Wow, this is about as gross as it gets."
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What sank the film
Affleck is careful not to let himself off the hook entirely. He has said before that he was drinking too much and going through a divorce at the time, and he repeats it here, but he insists none of that is what broke the film.
- Snyder's exit: the official reason, a family tragedy, which Affleck now says was used as cover.
- Whedon's reshoots: Fisher went public in July 2020, calling Whedon's on-set treatment of the cast and crew "gross, abusive, unprofessional". Gadot later said Whedon threatened her career. Whedon has denied her account.
- The money: the theatrical cut opened to $94 million in North America in November 2017, on a production budget reported at around $300 million, and Warner Bros. was projected to lose up to $100 million on it.
- The verdict, from the man in the cape: "I saw how not to make a movie like that, which is where the studio is at odds with the filmmaker."
That last line is the one fans are quoting now. In Affleck's version, the studio fighting its own director is what "really doomed" Justice League, which is a cheeky thing for Batman to say about the people who paid for the cape.
The cut that got out
There's one bit he's openly chuffed about. Affleck said he was "really glad and gratified that Zack got to release" his version, the four-hour Zack Snyder's Justice League which reached HBO Max on 18 March 2021. On Reddit, the argument has already moved on to whether a four-hour Snyder cut could ever have played in cinemas. Fair enough: no studio was going to book that.
Affleck has also said the experience killed his appetite for a solo Batman film, the one he was once set to direct himself. Warner Bros. lost a director to a tragedy and then, by Affleck's account, lost its Batman to the way it handled it.
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