14 DAY TRIAL // Since Warner Bros. and Zack Snyder announced that Ben Affleck would be playing Batman in the “Man of Steel” follow-up “Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice,” he’s gone off the radar. Perhaps aware of the high expectations he would have to meet, Affleck refused to engage the media or the fans in any way and started preparing for the role with many months in advance.
You see, he had no other choice. Affleck comes in to fill Batman’s shoes (boots?) after Christian Bale in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” trilogy, aka the franchise that reinvented the superhero movie concept by making comic book-based characters more real, darker, more mysterious and more appealing.
Christian Bale bulked up for the role three times in a row because his Bruce Wayne / Batman wasn’t just charming and wealthy, but also physically impressive. Even some of the fans who hate Affleck as Batman admit that he can’t have it easy having to come up after Bale, because he set the bar very high.
So, Affleck too started hitting the gym. In his first interview after the casting announcement, he stressed that this was a priority for him because he wasn’t exactly the kind of guy who had a superhero physique: sure, he was in shape, but he would never make a convincing Batman if he didn’t up his game.
By late May, word got out that he was training in Boston with Matt Damon’s cousin and his crew. Reports said that he’d already gained muscle mass but, up until that point, fans only had a photo of Affleck in the Batsuit, released by Zack Snyder, to go by. And we might as well be honest here, all those muscles he was flexing weren’t his, it was the Batsuit that gave the impression of a ripped physique.
It seems that Affleck is now drawing closer to his weight goal, as the photo above can confirm. Yahoo! Celebrity has more pics at the link, including a “before” shot, to have something to compare them against to understand just how much extra muscle mass Ben is carrying around. Hint: it’s a lot.
“Ben's t-shirt sported the logo for IPF — for the Institute of Performance & Fitness — a personal and group training center in North Reading, Mass. (a Boston suburb, near Andover), where Damon's cousin Jamie Damon works. Ben and Matt are both from Boston and notoriously proud of their home town,” the e-zine says.
Clearly, Ben is still a long way from having the body seen in the first official Batman photo, but it could be that this is not his goal. Bale’s suit also made him look much more muscular than he was, just like it happened with other Batmans, so it could be that Affleck’s current figure is what we’ll see on Bruce Wayne when the film comes out in May 2016.