Bret Easton Ellis Walks Back On THE BATMAN Comments; "I Have No Idea What The Script Is Like"
Despite making some pretty inflammatory comments about the state of Ben Affleck's Batman, author Bret Easton Ellis has backtracked by claiming the studio execs he spoke too AREN'T involved with the film.
Yesterday, comments from American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis started doing the rounds after he made some pretty shocking claims about where things stand with Ben Affleck's The Batman. In a piece published by The Ringer, he said that studio executives had told him that the script was a mess and that Warner Bros. didn't care because they knew that it was ultimately going to make money either way.
Given the fact that he's well known in Hollywood, Ellis' comments received a lot of coverage, but he's now taken to Facebook to backtrack somewhat. Well, completely actually. You see, it seems like he may have been speaking out of turn and that he didn't expect some gossip he'd heard to be published.
During a long interview with The Ringer’s Sean Fennessey we talked about reasons why studio movies are so bad now and touched on the global needs of the marketplace. I told him something I had heard about the new Batman movie as an example of what might be the problem: I was talking with two executives who have NOTHING to do with the Batman movie and who KNEW people who were involved with the production. The two executives I was having dinner with were relating the problems they had heard about the script from people working on the Batman project–that’s all. I know no one involved with the Batman movie and I didn’t realize that my comments would make it into The Ringer piece or else I wouldn’t have cited that particular movie–I have no idea what the Batman script is like and I regret that it came off as if I was disparaging the project. Another reason to be careful giving interviews.
Given Affleck's impressive track record as a filmmaker and the fact that he's collaborating with Geoff Johns on The Batman, this makes perfect sense, though there's no denying that those supposed rumblings Ellis heard are still interesting. Whether or not they're accurate is something we'll have to wait and see about, but the director/actor has said numerous times now that he's still working on it.