Sad Batman

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Part of a series on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. [View Related Entries]

About

Sad Batman is a photoshop meme based on a black-and-white photograph of actor Ben Affleck posing as the sullen-looking protagonist on the set of the upcoming Batman film. Similar to Sad Keanu and Sad Kayne, the meme involves editing a cutout exploitable of Ben Affleck's Batman into the background of images that accentuate his apparent loneliness.

Origin

On May 13th, 2014, Zack Snyder,^[1] the director of the Man of Steel sequel tentatively titled Batman vs. Superman (2016), tweeted the first picture from the set of the movie featuring Batman (played by Ben Affleck) standing next to the Batmobile. Within 48 hours, the photo gained over 44,000 retweets and over 24,000 favorites.

Within fifteen minutes, Twitter user LaughingStoic^[9] tweeted the photo with sad Keanu photoshopped into it captioned with the question, "why are u so sad batman?"

About half an hour later, the hashtag #SadBatman was introduced by Twitter user Willhanafin,^[2] and in the following 48 hours, the hashtag #SadBatman^[3] was tweeted out over 1,000 times.

Spread

On the same day as the photo was tweeted, The Daily Dot^[4] published an article titled “Why is Ben Affleck such a sad Batman? Here are some answers” and Blastr^[4] published an article titled “That didn’t take long: ‘Ben Affleck is Sad Batman’ memes already rolling in.” The meme was also covered by several sites on May 14th, including SlashFilm^[6], Metro^[7] and Yahoo Movies.^[8] Within 48 hours, the hashtag #SadBatman^[3] was tweeted out over 1,000 times.