Justice League 2 delayed due to Ben Affleck's The Batman

The sequel to Zack Snyder's DC team-up film was originally slated for release on 14 June, 2019

DCs future plans have had something of a minor shake-up.

Justice League 2 has been pushed back to make room for none other than Affleck's stand-alone The Batman movie, states The Hollywood Reporter. There's no reason given as to why DC has swapped the two films on the filming schedule, and there are almost too many possible explanations at this point to guess why: from changes in the DCEU timeline, to scheduling conflicts, or even the relative completion of each film.

Director Zack Snyder will instead use the sudden gap in his schedule to focus on a rare non-comic book adaptation, his long-gestating war thriller The Last Photograph; originally set to happen in the mid-2000s when the director found initial success with 300, but with the rights having since lapsed. In 2011, Christian Bale and Sean Penn were even briefly attached.

The story, conceived by Snyder himself and with a script penned by longtime collaborator Kurt Johnstad, focuses on a war correspondent in Afghanistan who become the only survivor of an attack on a group of Americans. When a special ops soldier shows up in search of information on a missing family member, the two team up as the correspondent hopes to score the story of his life.

Snyder's plan is apparently to repackage the project and approach Warner Bros., where he and his producing partner and wife Deborah Snyder have a first-look pact; with aims to start shooting in late 2017.

The Batman's push ahead in the schedule may help to silence the rumour - inadvertently started by none other than Bret Easton Ellis - that the project was in serious trouble.

There's no word yet on how this might affect the release dates of both Justice League 2 and The Batman, with the former pitched for a 14 June, 2019 release.