The First Image of Ben Affleck As Batman!

So director Zack Snyder tweeted out an image of Ben Affleck in his bat costume and rocked the world of geekdom to its core. Is it any surprise to anyone that it created a wave of interest and comments? Well, more like a tsunami.

There we have it! Our first glimpse of Affleck posing by his batmobile and looking the ever grizzled, imposing dark knight superhero.

It is a great picture and it has managed to reignite enthusiasm in fans who the vast majority have been skeptical since the casting of Affleck as the man in the cowl.

So yeah the photo looks really cool. The new suit looks a bit of an old school throwback to the pre-armor plated Bats Christian Bale was. Affleck fills the suit nicely with rippling muscles. It’s hard to tell how much of the muscle is the suit or him.

That’s one thing I never really doubted was Affleck being in top shape as Batman. I remember watching The Town and thinking he was pretty big in that. Him not looking like he could kick some ass in a dark alleys was never a concern of mine.

The batmobile, which fans initially thought Snyder would only be sharing a first look at with them kind of got overshadowed by the surprise addition of Affleck in his costume. No one was expecting to see him around. But Batman’s ride looks pretty awesome from what I can see of it. It looks like sort of a hybrid between Michael Keaton’s 1989 set of wheels and Christopher Nolan’s tumbler from his Dark Knight trilogy.

I can’t help but think there was a bit more strategy behind the release of this image by Snyder than it appears. I don’t buy he was just wandering around on set and suddenly decided to take a picture of Affleck and the car and thought it would just be fun to tweet out to fans.

I’m guessing this was all planned out and discussed beforehand by the powers that be. Perhaps it was just another tweak in this two-year long buzz this movie is going to be building up with or maybe this was to avoid some goofball with a cellphone preemptively snapping an unflattering picture of Affleck in the costume and sharing it with the world. Or it could be this was an attempt to alleviate some of the apprehension that the studio and filmmakers must know is out there about this movie.

Whatever the plan was it seems to have worked. The overall consensus is overwhelmingly positive for this brooding Batman that we’ll be seeing. It’s funny how one image can wipe away months of negative feelings in an instant.

Although this ‘Batfleck’ image looks good and has calmed the uneasiness about this Superman/Batman movie – this photo is probably being added to thousands of wallpaper backgrounds by the second – I still have that lingering feeling of doubt about it all. As good as the picture looks I keep coming back to the man who was behind the camera and his involvement in all this – Zack Snyder.

I’m not going to get into a whole Snyder discussion, but I’ll only say I would feel a heck of a lot more confident in this movie if it was another director attached. And that goes for having a different writer too! I’m not a big fan of Snyder and writer David S. Goyer.

Fans will have a lot of fun talking about this photo, discussing what they like about it, picking out little details and speculating about how this movie is going to be.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what the reaction will be to the first image of Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman. That should definitely cause an even bigger reverberation among superhero fans!