Last night, news broke that Warner Bros. Discovery has decided to scrap Batgirl. The news sent shockwaves across the DC fandom, especially after the studio spent $90 million on a movie which is in the midst of post-production. Fans can't understand why the nearly completed Batgirl would be forever shelved, but we now have new details from Variety.
While there have been rumblings that the studio was unhappy with the quality of the movie, the trade has been told that the reason for it being sidelined is far more simple: taxes.
With new CEO David Zaslav moving away from the idea of producing features for HBO Max, the plan at Warner Bros. is to make DC Comics movies that feel worthy of the big screen. Batgirl, which immediately came under fire from some fans for featuring what they deemed to be a poor-quality costume compared to those seen on The CW, didn't fit that vision.
It's said that the studio, now looking to tighten its bottom line, wasn't willing to spend tens of millions of dollars marketing the movie for theaters or streaming (those costs could have been as expensive as the production budget).
By shelving Batgirl and not releasing it in any way, Warner Bros. can now take a tax write-down that can help it recoup its costs. The movie's cancellation will be put down to a post-merger change of strategy, but that will mean the studio can never monetize Batgirl, whether it be through HBO Max or by selling it to another studio.
In other words, short of a huge leak, we'll never get to see this movie.
"The decision to not release Batgirl reflects our leadership’s strategic shift as it relates to the DC universe and HBO Max," a Warner Bros. spokesperson said in a statement yesterday, "Leslie Grace is an incredibly talented actor and this decision is not a reflection of her performance. We are incredibly grateful to the filmmakers of Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt and their respective casts and we hope to collaborate with everyone again in the near future."
It feels like Batgirl is being treated akin to a very expensive television pilot that was made and finished, but isn't destined to ever be released (like the Game of Thrones prequel starring Naomi Watts and Adrianne Palicki's Wonder Woman).
Despite that, it's honestly hard to believe we'll never get to see Batgirl, a movie that included the return of J.K. Simmons as Commissioner Gordon and Michael Keaton as Batman. Casting a diverse lead in Leslie Grace was a big step forward for the DCEU, while it remains unlikely that Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah delivered a bad movie based on their previous work.