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The knowledge of this behavior is what makes the announcement of Ben Affleck so newsworthy. The Bostonian exploded into the public consciousness with his Academy Award winning writing for Good Will Hunting, a film in which he also co-starred. That title garnered $138 million domestically against a $10 million production cost. He followed that by anchoring a pair of mega-budgeted tentpole films in Pearl Harbor and Armageddon. Affleck proved he could be a franchise lead actor as well when he starred as Jack Ryan in The Sum of All Fears, a $118 million blockbuster. He also excelled in less celebrated yet financially lucrative projects such as Changing Lanes and Daredevil, the latter of which gave Affleck experience in the spandex hero genre.

Most recently, Affleck has revealed another new skill. With Gone Baby Gone, he stepped behind the lens to direct a critically lauded project. On the production of The Town, Affleck displayed all of his remarkable skill-set by co-writing, directing and starring in the $37 million production that grossed $157 million worldwide. He duplicated this feat with Argo, and you know how well that went. The movie received the industry’s most treasured honorific, the Academy Award for Best Picture. It also was a box office blockbuster, attaining $221 million against a $45 million budget. Frankly, there is nothing left for Ben Affleck to accomplish in the movie industry.

This knowledge underscores how surprising the choice of Affleck is for Warner Bros. They witnessed a respected actor in Robert Downey Jr. become the face of The Avengers as well as the individual Iron Man franchise. They sought to duplicate this business practice by choosing an even more established Hollywood talent, at least relative to box office history. In the process, history repeated itself.

Simply stated, movie goers are never pleased with the announcement of the new Batman actor. They are now five for five in this behavior. Keaton was a comedian who was considered entirely miscast as an action hero. Notably, Jack Nicholson received every funny line in the movie, which may or may not be a direct response to the criticism. Val Kilmer may have been Iceman in Top Gun but he wasn’t on the tip of anybody’s tongue when Batman Forever was being cast. The former Real Genius may have been the scariest man in Tombstone and BFFs with Willow; he was not the people’s choice for Batman, though. Clooney was a television actor at a time when the feature film industry still looked down upon that medium. Well, more so than today. And nobody knew who Christian Bale was.

What we have witnessed with the social media shade thrown at Ben Affleck is nothing more than history repeating itself. And this turn of events should not be keeping anybody at Warner Bros. up at night, either. After all, Man of Steel is a soulless, grim production starring a virtual unknown in Henry Cavill. It earned $661 million anyway. And for all of the naysayers who bemoaned the lackluster quality of The Dark Knight Returns, that title still earned $80 million more than The Dark Knight worldwide.

Audiences have demonstrated time and again that they possess an insatiable hunger for comic book adaptations. Warner Bros. has now positioned itself exactly as Marvel did while plotting a path to The Avengers. They have a legitimate A-List actor in Ben Affleck to portray the hero of Gotham. They will square him off against the most famous superhero of all time, Superman, in a slam dunk blockbuster. Then, they will follow that with a Justice League movie that if done well could easily become one of the five biggest films of the 2010s. And Ben Affleck is poised to become the biggest star in the world, just as Robert Downey Jr. did with The Avengers.

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