Armie Hammer Explains Why His Batman Never Happened

It’s been six years since we first reported on a potential Justice League movie in the works. While six years isn’t really that long, relative to someone’s lifespan or how long these DC Comics characters have been around, it’s an eternity in the film business. Especially for a movie that isn’t a sequel. One of the first casting rumors to hit at the time had acting newcomer Armie Hammer taking the role of Batman. Hammer has since gone on to make a name for himself with starring turns in David Fincher’s Facebook movie The Social Network, Clint Eastwood’s biopic J. Edgar and, most recently, the big screen adaptation of The Long Ranger (which didn’t appear to make much box office magic this past weekend.) But whatever happened to his initial involvement, and the year-long Australian production planned? He shares the story with Marc Fennell of the Australian SBS2 series The Feed

Hammer tells the Aussie Fennell, “You guys had an election and changed your Prime Minister who changed your tax rebate incentive program and then we had a writer’s strike in the US so we couldn’t change anything in the script and everybody wanted to change things, so… it was a perfect storm.” Just when you thought that damned writers’ strike might never come up again, it rears its ugly, Justice League-denying head. Seemingly rubbing it in everyone’s faces, Hammer went on to say, “If what we were going for would have happened would have been the perfect combination of the realistic grittiness of the Dark Knight series mixed with the amazing detail and, sort of tactile nature of the Star Trek series.” Considering the backlash against the hopeless violence Zack Snyder gave us with Man of Steel, Justice League may need to get cheerier should it ever actually get made. Some of you may be saying to yourself, “But wait, didn’t you guys just report on current rumors that put Hammer back in the Batman role?” We sure did. But Hammer had something to say about this as well, though he didn’t directly reference the rumors. When asked if he would be willing to entertain the role again, Hammer was rather pessimistic. “I don’t know man. That was before Marvel had crushed it with everything. It just doesn’t seem like it’ll be executed as well as Marvel’s done theirs. What they did is they created a following for each of the individual characters and then put them together in a movie, so you had all the people who were Thor fans, all the people who were Hulk fans, all the people who were Iron Man fans, all came together to watch this one mega movie. That was a great idea.” Of course, saying Justice League won’t be as good as The Avengers just proves that Hammer isn’t a moron, but in no way speaks to how interested he is in playing Batman. This story isn’t over yet, people!