I do not know the answer to the question in the title of this post, but there are a number of possibilities.
To recap: it has been understood for a while now that Ben Affleck plans to adapt Dennis Lehane’s Edgar Award-winning Live By Night for the screen and that Savannah is among the likeliest of shooting locations. (Click here for a variety of posts on this blog.)
Live By Night even had/has a release date of December 2015 — a prime time for releasing potential Oscar contenders.
But that timetable presumed that the so far untitled Superman-Batman project would begin shooting sometime early in 2014. That potential blockbuster, with Affleck as one of the sort-of-unlikely stars, was set for a summer 2015 release, but that has now been pushed back to 2016.
A blog post at the Chicago Tribune echoes the questions being raised by a plethora of other websites:
One continuing moving part is what this means for Affleck and his always busy schedule. Affleck was planning on directing “Live by Night” following production on “Superman-Batman,” with Warners already dating “Night” for Dec. 25, 2015.
It now seems unlikely that Affleck would be able to jump into the director’s chair before the end of 2014, which would put pressure on getting the film done on time in order to meet WB’s deadline.
In theory, Affleck could rush production of Live By Night, but that seems sort of unlikely unless shooting of the Batman movie gets pushed back even further.
For film industry professionals in Savannah and in the Southeast who were hoping to work on Live By Night, this news could create some other professional quandaries until we get a better idea what’s going on.