After Joss Whedon’s arrival, back in the news with comments from Ben Affleck, the franchise lost a sense of earnest passion that could have sustained a weary DCEU

Nine years after superhero epic Justice League arrived in cinemas, there ought to be very little left to say about how it all went wrong. Zack Snyder shot the film, Joss Whedon substantially rewrote and reshot it, and audiences eventually got to see both men’s versions. Any debate over their relative merits long ago disappeared. Whedon is pretty much cancelled; Snyder has reinvented himself as the writer-director of extremely average ersatz Star Wars movies for Netflix, and an entirely new DC universe is under way that has very little to do with either of them.

To a greater or lesser extent, the world has moved on. But Ben Affleck’s latest comments raise an uncomfortable question about whether Snyder’s departure was ever presented honestly. Speaking to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Affleck, who played Batman, described the Justice League reshoots as the lowest point of his career, but reserved his strongest criticism for the circumstances of Snyder’s departure. The director stepped away in May 2017, two months after his daughter Autumn killed herself, aged 20, with the public explanation that he needed to be with his family. Affleck, however, alleged that studio Warner Bros had used the tragedy to justify replacing him. “The way in which that was, I thought, used as an excuse was one of the shittiest things I’ve ever seen,” Affleck said. “It was so gross.”

He cut his teeth playing rock stars and pretty posh boys. Speaking from his LA home, the actor talks about landing his first blockbuster lead in the grisly DC horror. Will it be too shocking for comic book fans?

Exactly 13 years ago this month, Tom Rhys Harries was hanging by his ankles from a meat hook every night. Playing a teenage rock’n’roll idol abducted by gangsters in a revival of Jez Butterworth’s Mojo, Harries was fresh out of drama school and the only unknown in a cast led by Ben Whishaw and Rupert Grint. The Guardian’s Michael Billington likened him to “an embryonic Elvis”.

Now the 36-year-old Cardiff-born actor has the title role in Clayface, a violent DC Comics supervillain blockbuster set in Batman’s stomping ground, Gotham City. This puts him in the company of fellow Brits in the comic-book universe, such as Tom Holland (Spider-Man), Robert Pattinson (Batman) and David Jonsson, recently announced as the new Black Panther. “I felt ready to do this,” says Harries. “Had I been younger, I’d have been suffocated by the insecurity of wanting to do a good job but not having that quiet trust in getting there.”

Warning: contains spoilers
The four short scenes added to the new version has made the film the highest-grossing of all time – but the only people really enjoying this are the Disney accountants

Does it really matter which film is the highest-grossing of all time at the global box office? Will James Cameron be lying awake at night staring into the darkness and pondering whether to withdraw humanity’s access to giant, blue-skinned space elves out of sheer spite, just because Avatar has been dethroned once again by Avengers: Endgame? It seems unlikely. Are the Russo brothers at this very moment leaping and capering with wild abandon because adding a few new scenes and releasing their film for the umpteenth time has led to this momentous changing of the guard? Probably not. Is a Disney accountant somewhere holding a tiny awards ceremony in which every nominee is himself? Well yes, absolutely, because the mouse house ultimately owns both films.

And yet the most interesting thing about Avengers: Endgame’s return to cinemas is not how much money it has made – for the record, the rerelease, titled Avengers Endgame: Encore, had brought in another $126m worldwide by last weekend, taking its lifetime total to approximately $2.925bn (just ahead of Avatar’s $2.923bn) – but what Marvel added to the picture while we were all busy counting.