Zack Snyder has been sharing black-and-white photos from his time in The DCEU to his recently-created Instagram account, and has now posted a never-before-seen shot of Ben Affleck as the Dark Knight from his first appearance as the character in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
Snyder posted to photo mark a follower milestone.
"Thank you for 300,000 followers. It’s been a fun six weeks on here, and I’m just getting started. Shot this on my Leica Monochrom with a 50mm—more to come."
A lot of Snyder's fans have picked up on that "only getting started" comment (and read way too much into it, no doubt), but should we really be making anything of the filmmaker sharing these photos?
The #RestoreTheSnyderVerse faithful remain hopeful that Snyder will step behind the camera for another DC Comics-based film at some point, but we can't imagine there's much more to this than a filmmaker with a large following 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."