Variety published a cover story about Warner Bros. CEO Kevin Tsujihara, and spoke to Ben Affleck about his experience working with WB. After a poor 2015 at the box office, Warner Bros. is hoping Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice turns things around next year.
“I think there is a ton of pressure on it,” Affleck said of the film, in which he plays Batman. “I mean I would be bullshitting you to say there isn’t.”
“You’ll see next year they are going to have a great year,” Affleck said. “They are now developing … probably the single greatest under-exploited IP asset in the entertainment business, the DC comic world. And now they have started to exploit that and you are going to see that blossom. And, when it does, it’s going to be massive.”
Affleck also revealed that Tsujihara is very hands-on at Warner Bros. He was deeply involved in creating Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, even in the early days of the project when they were working on the script.
“I was really impressed by that and by the intelligence of his notes, and the fact that he cared,” said Affleck. “It was not like some guys, especially at that level, where it would be, ‘We need a franchise movie … we just need a movie with the names ‘Batman’ and ‘Superman’ on it and it doesn’t matter what it is. For him, that wasn’t it. He was willing to take longer to make the movie to get it right to make it a movie of higher quality.”
Affleck ended the interview by talking about the pressure once again. “We are a very kind of instant gratification culture when it comes to analyzing the film business. And there is a lot of hyperbole involved,” he said. “Nonetheless, there’s a lot of pressure on it. If it doesn’t do well, that will be extremely disappointing.”
SOURCE: Variety
