Even after Zack Snyder announced Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice at Comic-Con, rumours persisted that Christian Bale would reprise the role of The Dark Knight in order to go to war with the Man of Steel. However, the casting of Ben Affleck put those stories to bed once and for all.
Surprisingly though, execs at Warner Bros. seemingly persisted in hassling the filmmaker about including actors from Christopher Nolan’s trilogy, and that led to Snyder contemplating offering Bale a role in the DC Films Universe as a completely different character.
“This is a total and opposite reality from the Chris Nolan movies. It’s another universe, so we couldn’t hire Christian Bale if we wanted to, because he doesn’t exist in our world. Maybe we could hire him to play another part. We did talk about that briefly. I just wanted to hire Christian to play another part to make that obvious. Christian could play, like, Alfred with age makeup. No! Of course not. But you know what I mean.
Even people at the studio would say, ‘Who are you getting from the other movies?’ And I was like, ‘Hey, come on guys, let’s all understand, it’s a different world.’ In the Batman universe that Chris Nolan created, Superman would have a hard time existing. That that’s why we did a reboot on the universe, so we could allow these characters to exist together. We needed to do that to have Batman exist in this world.”
It doesn’t sound like Snyder gave this any real consideration, but it would have been a lot of fun to see Bale in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. Who he could have played is another matter altogether, but with three appearances as Batman under his belt, it’s hard to imagine that the picky actor would have wanted to make a return to the comic book genre.
