Hopefully one day Ben Affleck will tell us all about the Batman script that he was working on that we’ll never get to see (director Matt Reeves confirmed he’s starting over with a new story), but today, we have a little hint as to what could have been.

According to The Wrap’s Umberto Gonzalez, Ben Affleck’s script for The Batman was inspired by David Fincher’s 1997 mystery thriller The Game. And if you needed any confirmation on that, the tweet where Gonzalez announced this news was “liked” by (former?) The Batman star, Joe Manganiello.

…THE GAME also was the inspiration for the previous THE BATMAN script before Matt Reeves started over. https://t.co/nKYvQ3fMkL — Umberto Gonzalez (@elmayimbe) September 12, 2017

I’ve never seen The Game, so here’s a brief synopsis from Wikipedia for some context:

The Game is a 1997 American mystery thriller film directed by David Fincher, starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, and produced by Propaganda Films and PolyGram Filmed Entertainment. It tells the story of a wealthy investment banker who is given a mysterious gift: participation in a game that integrates in strange ways with his everyday life. As the lines between the banker’s real life and the game become more uncertain, hints of a large conspiracy become apparent.

The words I’m focusing on there are “mystery thriller”. I had heard that Ben Affleck’s Batman script was very detective focused, so it being inspired by a mystery thriller definitely makes sense.

If that idea excites you, the good news is Matt Reeves has said that The Batman will be a “noir driven, detective version of Batman”. So at least we won’t be losing that aspect completely.