Live By Night

I‘ve never seen 75 million dollars. It’s more than I have ever had, will ever have, and in all likelihood, more than I will cumulatively earn over the course of my entire life. I can’t really even conceive of how much money that is, the buying power it represents. So the news that Ben Affleck singlehandedly lost $75,000,000 for Warner Bros. with his pricy and apparently unappealing Live By Night has been kind of hard to process. Why doesn’t he have to go to jail? How is he allowed to continue directing movies? This defies all the laws of Monopoly, my lone primer on the ins and outs of macroeconomics.

Ben Affleck is frustrated. And who could blame him? Anyone who dons Batman’s iconic cape and mask is immediately the center of superhero fans’ attention, both positive and negative. But Affleck doesn’t just want to live in a Batman bubble and only be asked about Batman. (Valid, but what did you expect dude?)

Joe Coughlin should have listened to his dad. Joe (Ben Affleck) was a gangster (although he preferred the term outlaw) and his father Thomas (Brendan Gleeson) was a cop in their hometown of Boston. Over dinner one night, Thomas warns Joe: “What you put out into the world always come back to you.” “But,” he adds, “not how you expect.”

Our ongoing celebration of the best from the world of film in 2016 continues with our ranking of the finest movie posters of the year. In the gallery above you’ll see our picks for the 25 best. They range from massive hits to to tiny indie releases; we decided not to limit our list just to huge commercial successes. We don’t determine a movie’s quality by its box office totals. Why should we determine a poster’s quality that way?

Ben Affleck will try to reactivate his Argo mojo with Live By Night, a new prestige-y gangster picture coming to theaters very late in December (and expanding wider in 2017). Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane (who also wrote the source for Affleck’s first directorial effort, Gone Baby Gone), the film stars Affleck, who also directed and penned the screenplay, as the son of a Boston police captain who ventures into a life of crime. The cast also includes Elle Fanning, Brendan Gleeson, and Sienna Miller. Here’s the official synopsis:

Ben Affleck’s new gangster movie Live by Night just debuted its first trailer early last month, with a January release date, which hinted that the film would probably be in the running for that little awards show called the Oscars in 2017. Now it’s official, as the film has a December limited release date before it goes wide early next year.

It’s been a big year for Ben Affleck, who put on the black cape in both Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad this summer, but the later part of this year will see him sink his teeth into more understated, non-superhero roles. He’ll make math thrilling in The Accountant in October, and after that he’ll venture down into the gangster underworld of the 1920s in Live By Night, which is looking like an awards season contender now that its wide release date has been moved up to January 2018.

Warner Bros. has done a little release date-shuffling, moving a few of their upcoming films around — most notably (and perhaps disappointingly) with The LEGO Movie 2, which was originally set to hit theaters in 2018 and will now arrive nine months later in 2019. The good news is that we still have two new LEGO Movie spinoffs coming in 2017, and Ben Affleck’s Live By Night will now hit theaters a bit earlier than expected.

Ben Affleck’s commitment to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has caused a few delays for his next directorial effort, Live by Night, which was originally set to hit theaters in 2015. Warner Bros. has announced yet another new release date for the thriller, hopefully one that’s a bit more permanent this time around. The studio has also set dates for a few other films, including the sequel to The Conjuring spinoff Annabelle.

If you were to assemble a list of the busiest guys in the film business, Ben Affleck would probably being hanging out near the top. As a writer, producer, director, and actor, he bounces around the Hollywood spectrum, dividing his time between massive blockbusters and smaller, more personal projects. Eventually, something had to give. Two of Affleck’s upcoming movies, Live by Night and The Accountant, have been delayed to make room for the star to write and direct the Batman vs. Superman spinoff, The Batman.