Countdown to Batman vs Superman. It doesn’t have much competition this weekend either. Or the week after that. So it’s free to dominate the box office for at least two or three weeks. Which is great for Warner Bros. Because, as Sarah has noted several times already, BvS has to clear a billion. And, well, there’s a Civil War coming. As much as they protest that it’s not a competition, it’s a f-cking competition. That said, given that BvS doesn’t seem to have any obstacles in its way, that also means there are no excuses.

So Ben Affleck’s busy. He’s busy complimenting Jennifer Garner, calling her a “superhero mom” and telling E! News that he’s “really lucky to have her” and also taking questions about that tattoo. You know, the tattoo:

Jennifer Garner addressed the tattoo. Her comment about it ended the profile of her in Vanity Fair. And it was glorious. Here’s how it read:

One thing is for sure: she refuses to claim responsibility for the midlife-crisis tattoo—the rising phoenix—that takes up her estranged husband’s entire back, as seen in photographs. “You know what we would say in my hometown about that? ‘Bless his heart.’ A phoenix rising from the ashes. Am I the ashes in this scenario?” Garner says with a wink.

“I take umbrage. I refuse to be the ashes.”

So. The tattoo was real, right?

The BvS junket was last Thursday. Sounds like everyone wanted to talk about Ben’s tat. And the big headline that emerged this weekend from Extra is that he seemed to confirm to Mario Lopez that it was actually “fake for a movie”. See below, starting at 1:30:

OK but… that’s not exactly how he answered the question on both Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight. Access Hollywood took a (very) indirect approach to asking him about it, and he knew for sure what they were asking, but he didn’t come right out and call it fake:

With Entertainment Tonight though, Ben talks about how he’s never seen a “good representation of it in the media”. And then Henry Cavill jokes that the tat is “very small” because we all know that thing is massive and terrible. Watch below. Does this sound like a denial to you?

So… is it really fake? Or…

Was it real and now it’s fake because he realised how f-cking embarrassing and cheesy that sh-t was and is now trying to remove it so that, eventually, when he says it was “fake” that will actually be the truth?

After you finish thinking about that question, here’s another one:

Who did his eyes?

Because goddamn those are the freshest eyes I have seen in a long, long time. And they keep getting fresher! Here he is, travelling from Asia to Mexico to New York in a matter of days, and those eyes, those eyes look like they were just born.