Finn Brooks: You texted me at midnight just 'Bloodlines. Read it.' and then nothing else, so.
Hope Sterling: Because I literally could not form sentences! Joe Manganiello's memoir just dropped and he's in there describing— okay, Ben Affleck's Batman was going to murder Commissioner Gordon. As in, Deathstroke kills J.K. Simmons's Gordon. On screen. Central act of revenge.
Finn Brooks: No no no, say that again— Deathstroke kills Gordon? That's the movie?
Hope Sterling: That's the INCITING— no wait, it's the climax of the whole manipulation. Deathstroke, Manganiello's Slade Wilson, is made to believe Batman killed his son. So he goes piece by piece— kills Gordon, kidnaps Alfred, Jeremy Irons Alfred, breaches the actual Batcave.
Finn Brooks: Affleck pitched this as a Fincher's The Game thing, right? Psychological dismantling, not punching. And he was going to direct it himself, which— has any Batman actor ever done that?
Hope Sterling: No! That's the whole thing, he'd have been the first. Writer, director, producer, star— all four. And then he stepped back for 'personal reasons' which tells us nothing, and the movie just... never happened.
Finn Brooks: Okay I love the ambition but— Manganiello's memoir is one guy's memory of a film that never even shot. How locked were any of these story beats actually?
Hope Sterling: Mmm, fair, but like— killing Gordon? That's not a vibe you forget. That's a choice.
Finn Brooks: That's— yeah. That's a real point.
Hope Sterling: But how final is any of this, you know? Because Manganiello's working from memory. It's a memoir about a movie that literally never entered production.
Finn Brooks: That's the thing that got me. It's like — okay, you know when your friend tells you the plot of the novel they were going to write? Vivid, detailed, you're kind of obsessed by it — but it's not a manuscript. It's a conversation they're remembering.
Hope Sterling: Ugh, no, that's — yeah, that actually lands.
Finn Brooks: And *Bloodlines* is one actor's recollection of early creative conversations — not a shooting script, not a locked outline. These could be ideas Affleck was pitching in a room that would've changed six times before cameras rolled. I'm not dismissing it, I just — wait, how do we even know what percentage of this survived to, like, draft three?
Hope Sterling: We don't! And that's what kills me, because Gordon getting murdered, Batgirl nearly dying, Alfred getting kidnapped — those feel like load-bearing plot points, not vibes someone floated once. But yeah, I cannot prove that.
Finn Brooks: Okay but here's the detail that actually — no, wait, this is the part that made me put my phone down. Manganiello's entire DCEU existence is one post-credits cameo in the 2017 Justice League theatrical cut. One scene. And that scene was originally supposed to tease Affleck's solo Batman film — and then when the Batman film collapsed, they re-edited it to tease a Justice League sequel instead. A sequel that also never happened.
Hope Sterling: Stop. His cameo got recycled to advertise a different movie that ALSO got scrapped?
Finn Brooks: One appearance. Two failed promises. The man showed up once across the entire DCEU and that single scene couldn't even hold its original purpose. Before James Gunn and Peter Safran rebooted everything and officially ended his run — his only footage was basically a teaser for things that evaporated. That's the memoir in miniature, honestly.
Hope Sterling: And that's the thing that actually makes me want to defend the hot take a little — like, the memoir-as-unreliable-document argument is real, but the Fincher comparison isn't a vibe, it's a blueprint. Affleck said it out loud. He wanted to make The Game but with Batman.
Finn Brooks: No but that framing changes everything about how you read the Gordon murder, right? Because in The Game, Michael Douglas's whole life is methodically taken apart — people he trusts, places he's safe, his sense of reality — and Deathstroke is doing that exact same thing. He's not blowing up Metropolis. He's finding every person Bruce Wayne loves and removing them.
Hope Sterling: Surgical. Not a supervillain, like, a scalpel.
Finn Brooks: Which — okay, I want to give the hot take its partial win here because that IS the real story. Imagine explaining this at a school pickup in 2026. 'Why are you sad about a Batman movie?' 'He was trying to make The Game but with Batman.' That sentence lands. That's a real pitch.
Hope Sterling: And he was going to carry it alone — writer, director, producer, star, all four — which is insane, and then Manganiello actually said that out loud to him, like, 'that sounds like a lot,' and Affleck's response was 'Yeah, I know… but don't worry, you're in good hands.' That quote! That's the whole man in one sentence.
Finn Brooks: Wait, he said 'you're in good hands' — about himself?
Hope Sterling: About himself! To his lead actor! It's — I don't know if that's delusional or incredibly confident or just someone who genuinely believed they had it. Maybe all three.
Finn Brooks: And that's actually where the step-back hits hardest, because the singular vision and the singular person were the same thing. When Affleck stepped away for personal reasons, there was no version of this film without him — the auteur control and the actor were inseparable. Warner Bros. didn't cancel an idea, they lost the one person holding it.
Hope Sterling: Oh and — Batgirl! Okay, her DCEU debut was supposed to be in this film. Nearly killed by Deathstroke mid-movie, she and Batman escape on an aboveground train. That's her entrance. And it's just... gone.
Finn Brooks: And honestly, Deathstroke's whole trajectory across the DCEU after this is basically the same story on repeat — we should get into that, because it gets worse before it gets better, and it never gets better.
Hope Sterling: It never gets better — that's the actual verdict, right? Because Aquaman 2, every iteration of a Suicide Squad sequel, a standalone Deathstroke film — all of them got floated, none of them got made. He was considered for so many things and appeared in zero of them.
Finn Brooks: Wait — Aquaman 2? They actually considered putting Deathstroke in Aquaman?
Hope Sterling: Considered! Like, the character kept getting picked up and set back down. Multiple Suicide Squad sequel versions, Aquaman 2, the standalone — Warner Bros. kept saying 'yes, we have Deathstroke' and then just... not using him. For years.
Finn Brooks: That's not bad luck, that's actually — I mean, that's a structural thing. They had the piece, they couldn't build the board.
Hope Sterling: And then James Gunn and Peter Safran come in, reboot everything, Snyderverse is done, Manganiello's out entirely. Not because anything went wrong creatively — because the whole continuity just got erased. His Deathstroke never got a real movie. Not once.
Finn Brooks: Okay but — and this is the part that actually sharpens it for me — the Leslie Grace Batgirl situation makes it worse, because that's a completely separate project. Different film, different character arc, shelved well into production. That's not the same collapse.
Hope Sterling: No, literally — two separate Batgirls, two separate cancellations, zero overlap. The Batgirl who nearly dies in Affleck's film, and then the Leslie Grace Batgirl movie that actually got made and then got buried? The DCEU just kept erasing women before they had a scene anyone could watch.
Finn Brooks: That's — okay, that's the defensible claim, right there. It wasn't one dark film being too risky. Warner Bros. failed to use every piece they'd already built.
Hope Sterling: Structural fragility, not creative ambition. Like, Affleck's vision might have been a lot — maybe it was, maybe it wasn't — but Manganiello never even got a shot somewhere else. The collapse wasn't the darkness. It was that nothing underneath it held.
Finn Brooks: Okay but — I have to give you the win here. The whole film only exists in *Bloodlines: A Memoir*. One actor's book. That's the entire archive. And I mean — that is actually the most DCEU thing that could have happened? Affleck says 'you're in good hands' and the hands... produced a memoir.
Hope Sterling: Buddy. WHOSE hands. That's my sign-off on this whole era, I'm done.
Finn Brooks: The detail I cannot shake — and I mean cannot shake — Deathstroke's one appearance in the entire DCEU was a post-credits cameo that got re-edited to advertise a different movie that also never happened. He's in the memoir AND the cameo and neither of them went anywhere. That's my thing. What's yours?
Hope Sterling: Gordon. J.K. Simmons. Dead. We've never seen that. We will never see that. It lived in the pitch, it lived in Joe Manganiello's memoir, and now it lives here. Cheers to the Batman film that existed exactly nowhere.
