Ben Affleck has laid bare the behind-the-scenes turmoil of 2017’s Justice League, directly accusing Warner Bros. of weaponizing Zack Snyder‘s family tragedy to wrest control of the film away from its director.
In early 2017, Snyder stepped away from post-production following the tragic death of his 20-year-old daughter, Autumn, by suicide. Warner Bros. subsequently brought in Joss Whedon to spearhead extensive rewrites and reshoots that fundamentally altered the film’s tone, vision, and narrative structure.
Reflecting on that pivot during an appearance on Happy Sad Confused with Josh Horowitz, Affleck pulled no punches about how the studio navigated Snyder’s departure.
“The personal thing, you know somebody’s death by suicide is that, that eclipses everything,” Affleck said. “And then the way in which that was, I thought frankly, used as an excuse, I just thought was one of the sh***iest things I’d ever seen, you know, and it was so gross.”
Affleck emphasized that the production was crippled from the outset by corporate interference, creating an adversarial working relationship that doomed the project before cameras even stopped rolling.
“Boy, that was shitty that him being taken off that movie and the reshoots that we did,” Affleck continued. “That was the low—if you want the low point of my career, was that. And also the fact that I really saw how not to make a movie like that, which is when the studio is at odds with the filmmaker, you’re really making a mistake, and that was what really doomed that.”
Affleck’s frustration went well beyond the studio’s decisions, with the toxic atmosphere on the set leaving its own mark on the cast and on him personally.
Justice League Reshoots Became the Lowest Point of Ben Affleck’s Career
The hostile environment created during the reshoots has been widely documented over the years, most notably by co-stars Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot. While Affleck noted he was not personally involved in every confrontation on set, the fallout was impossible to ignore.
Eventually, it exacerbated Affleck’s own private struggles at the time, leading to a period marked by heavy drinking and the collapse of his marriage.
“It was just like, wow, this is about as gross as it gets,” Affleck said. “And I was drinking too much, you know? That’s when I started to feel like, boy, I’d like to quit drinking and I’m having a hard time not drinking,” Affleck recalled. “I got divorced. It was definitely a very difficult time for me personally, but those things, while painful, were not what impacted that movie. They just happened to be happening at the same time.”
Despite the wreckage of the theatrical release, Affleck expressed profound gratification over the grassroots campaign that eventually pressured the studio into releasing Zack Snyder’s Justice League on HBO Max in 2021.
The gap between the two versions was stark. The 2017 cut holds a 39% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes and earned roughly $661 million worldwide against a reported budget near $300 million.
Snyder’s version boasts a 71% critics score and a 92% audience score on a reported additional $70 million to complete, and while it has no box office total because it streamed on HBO Max, Forbes estimated it could bring in around $266 million a year in subscription revenue for the service.
However, whatever the scores and box office earnings say, Affleck’s remarks are a reminder of what the 2017 production cost the people involved, and for Snyder and his family, that price was far higher than any budget.
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