Ticket to Paradise actor George Clooney had a few choice words about who he considers being the best live-action Batman while addressing the press at the new Roybal Film & Television Magnet School in Los Angeles. There’s a slight chance he may have come off a little biased, with the actor also taking the opportunity to poke a little fun at a fellow big-screen caped crusader.
In a clip shared on Twitter by The Hollywood Reporter, Clooney is making a point of actors not generally being associated with education. To drive his point home, he tells the audience — “You look at me and you just think, ‘Oh! He’s the best Batman!’
Clooney gets a few laughs from the crowd and decides to double down on the bit, throwing Ben Affleck under the bus, suggesting that maybe Affleck was the best Batman available at the time. He drives the point home quite confidently, saying:
Ben Affleck, really? He’s got nothing on me!
Clooney is known for donning the bat cowl for the universally hated 1997 Batman & Robin, with a cringeworthy 12 percent and 16 percent rating by critics and audiences respectively on Rotten Tomatoes.
In contrast, the title holder for the most loved Batman movie by both critics and audiences remains 2008’s The Dark Knight starring Christian Bale. Meanwhile, the most celebrated Batman movie starring Affleck, the butt of Clooney’s joke, is 2021’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League, currently rated 71 percent by critics and 94 percent by audiences.
Clooney was speaking at the Roybal Film & Television School in Los Angeles, which he helped establish. The school’s mission is to help historically underrepresented students with an interest in the film and television industries develop their skills for a future career in those disciplines.
The school’s advisory board is full of star power – it is also backed by Don Cheadle, Mindy Kaling, and Eva Longoria. It received $4 million in funding from Amazon, Disney, Fox, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery, among others. The most recent Bruce Wayne, Robert Pattinson, is set to reprise his role for a sequel to this year’s The Batman.
