A 43-second video featuring some never-before-seen BTS footage from the scrapped Batgirl movie has found its way online, and it shows Barbara Gordon engaging in a fairly brutal-looking scrap with several goons.
As far as we know, this is not star Leslie Grace in the Batgirl suit, but her stunt performer Emely Cartagena.
The impressively choreographed sequence has gained a lot of attention, and following the recent news that Ketchup Entertainment is in advanced negotiations to acquire the rights to Coyote Vs. Acme from Warner Bros., fans are once again calling for the release of Batgirl.
Warner Bros. Discovery boss David Zaslav's decision to shelve the HBO Max movie when it was already so deep into post-production was one of the biggest news stories of 2022, and was met with a significant amount of backlash from every corner of the industry.
The project was scrapped as a tax write-off, with reports doing the rounds at the time that Barbara Gordon's first solo outing simply wasn't very good.
DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran would later suggest that Batgirl may have been even more of a mess than we'd been led to believe.
"I saw the movie, and there are a lot of incredibly talented people in front of and behind the camera on that film. But that film was not releasable, and it happens sometimes. That film was not releasable. I actually think that [president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery David] Zaslav and the team made a very bold and courageous decision to cancel it because it would have hurt DC. It would have hurt those people involved."
More recently, art department assistant Annie Mitchell claimed that the movie was a lot closer to completion than we realized.
"It’s insane that they scrapped it. It was literally completely finished VFX and everything," she said in response to a TikTok comment. "I definitely believe it still exists tho. Really hoping someone leaks it in 10 years."
While some version of the movie might still exist somewhere in WB's vaults, the chances of it ever seeing the light of day are pretty slim at this stage. In his latest newsletter, Jeff Sneider says he does not expect Batgirl to be released.
"Those holding out hope of a similar “rescue” deal for WB’s shelved Batgirl movie, you’ll have to keep dreaming, as my sources unfortunately don’t expect that superhero movie to ever see the light of day."
Check out the footage in the player below, and let us know what you think.