When Warner Bros. Discovery decided to pull the plug on Batgirl - despite the fact principal photography had ended - fans and filmmakers alike were left reeling. It was an unprecedented move, and one which saw Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah's DC Comics adaptation deemed "unreleasable."
Considering the fact moviegoers have suffered through the likes of Black Adam and The Flash over the past year or so, it's hard to believe a title made for Max was really that bad. Instead, it seems likely David Zaslav simply wanted to save money by scrapping a movie which wouldn't recoup its costs from a streaming debut.
We may never know the full story, but in an interview with Yahoo Entertainment, El Arbi admitted that what happened still stings.
"I think about Batgirl every day," the filmmaker says. "I replay the making of the movie in my head, thinking, 'What should we have done differently?' But as we say, that was God's plan. We can only hope to come back to DC one day."
The duo, who received widespread critical acclaim for their work on Ms. Marvel, would have to be gluttons for punishment to return to DC but time will tell on that front. What is clear is that they were confident in their vision for Batgirl.
"It was really a blend between Nolan and Burton," El Arbi says of their approach to Barbara Gordon's corner of the DCEU. "Gotham City was a more realistic world, and the story was very straightforward and emotional. It was more of an actor's movie without a lot of visual effects."
"We don't really like CGI, so we used a lot of miniatures. There was this one great action sequence where a truck crashed into a tunnel and we did it with miniatures like Burton did in Batman. It remains the coolest thing we've ever done in movies - it was old-school filmmaking and we'll do it again!"
As for whether he believes Batgirl would have been a hit in theaters, the filmmaker chose his words carefully but shared high praise for Brendan Fraser's take on Firefly.
"We had to keep the budget low, so it was a very grounded story. But the fact that the budget wasn't that high already would have helped it be a success. People do love the Bat family: they love Batgirl, they love Gotham City, they love Michael Keaton and Brendan Fraser gave an Oscar-worthy performance in the movie."
"[The] movie was supposed to be for streaming, which allows you freedoms that you don't get in theaters. If it was a theatrical movie, we might have needed to have had bigger action sequences than we had. But we'll never know!"
Warner Bros. Discovery is rumoured to have deleted Batgirl in an effort to avoid a "Snyder Cut"-style situation down the line, so the chances of this movie ever seeing the light of day are slim to none. Zaslav, who compared The Flash to The Dark Knight, made the decision to scrap Batgirl and that probably tells you all you need to know about whether it was as bad as some have claimed.