Joe Manganiello

Earlier this week, a few little birdies spoke with /Film about Warner Bros. standalone superhero film The Batman being rewritten completely from scratch. According to the site’s sources, the studio has chosen to start all over again with input from director Matt Reeves; additional sources also noted that Reeves wouldn’t even meet with prospective cast members until sometime this summer. This came on the heels of comments from a Variety reporter that Reeves is still under contract for War for the Planet of the Apes through the end of June, meaning The Batman was unlikely to even enter production until 2018.

So, The Batman. Is it happening? Will we ever see it? Is Ben Affleck second-guessing his decision to join the Snyderverse? It seems every time we talk about this movie another doomsday scenario (no pun intended) is right over the horizon. It did finally acquire a new director — Matt Reeves has officially signed on after a short little negotiating game — but production is still, as far as we know, halted.

To celebrate the birthday of DC’s Geoff Johns, Joe Manganiello has shared a new photo of Deathstroke, and it’s…a little blurry. In case you’d forgotten, the actor is playing the Batman villain in Ben Affleck’s solo film, simply titled The Batman — but we might get a peek at the baddie in action a little sooner than that, as Deathstroke is rumored to be making a brief appearance in Zack Snyder’s Justice League.

Excited about more Batfleck in The Batman? No one is more pumped for it than Ben Affleck himself, probably, but Joe Manganiello’s enthusiasm comes pretty close. While appearing on a podcast this week, he said all the right things about the standalone Batman movie that have us feeling hopeful that maybe the DC cinematic universe’s darkest days could be behind it.

The future of the DC Cinematic Universe is filled with lots of mystery. We don’t know what that second Justice League film we be called, nor do we have many details on Aquaman and Shazam. But we might finally have an idea as to when Ben Affleck’s solo Batman movie will hit theaters.

Zack Snyder likes to tweet photos from the set of his movies. They’re usually first looks at cool stuff like costumes and Batmobiles and whatnot. So it wasn’t out of the ordinary for Snyder to tweet something like this yesterday:

More and more, TV and film actors of the DC universe have been able to appreciate one another’s shared roles. We’ve seen one Flash digging another’s costume, and now Arrow star Manu Bennett weighs in on Joe Manganiello taking the role of Deathstroke to the big screen for Ben Affleck’s solo Batman movie.

Just last week, Ben Affleck shared a new set video that revealed an interesting new addition to the DCEU: Deathstroke, the masked comic-book villain who sorta-kinda resembles Deadshot. That footage left us with a couple of big questions; who is playing Deathstroke, and is he appearing in Justice League or the new solo Batman movie? DC’s Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns has given us the answer to one of those questions.

The sequel to this summer's Man of Steel, which director Zack Snyder confirmed at Comic-Con would feature a new actor in the role of Batman, is only in the script stage, so it may be a tad early to speculate about who might be the next actor to wear the cape and cowl. So let's speculate. Some of the names floating around include Drive's Ryan Gosling, No Country for Old Men's Josh Brolin, True Bloo