When Warner Bros. Discovery decided to pull the plug on Batgirl—even though principal photography had wrapped—fans and filmmakers alike were left reeling. It was an unprecedented move and one that saw Ms. Marvel directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah's DC Comics adaptation labelled "unreleasable" in reports from the trades.
Seeing as moviegoers had already suffered through the likes of Black Adam and The Flash, it was hard to believe a title made for HBO Max could really be that bad. Ultimately, the prevailing theory was that David Zaslav wanted to save money by scrapping the movie as a "tax write-off," which wouldn't recoup its costs from a streaming debut.
For what it's worth, DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran has said Batgirl "was not releasable" and, perhaps predictably, praised "Zaslav and the team [for making a] very bold and courageous decision to cancel it because it would have hurt DC."
As the DCEU's new Caped Crusader following Ben Affleck's disappearance in The Flash, Michael Keaton was enlisted to return as Batman alongside Leslie Grace's Barbara Gordon. The Mummy star Brendan Fraser, meanwhile, was set to play the villainous Ted Carson, a.k.a. Firefly.
Talking to Associated Press, the actor didn't hold back on how he feels about Batgirl being shelved by the executives at Warner Bros. Discovery.
"A whole movie," he started. "There were four floors of production in Glasgow. I was sneaking into the art department just to geek out. The product — I’m sorry, 'content' — is being commodified to the extent that it’s more valuable to burn it down and get the insurance on it than to give it a shot in the marketplace."
"There’s a generation of little girls who don’t have a heroine to look up to and go, 'She looks like me,'" he said of Grace's Batgirl before expanding on his concerns about where the industry is heading. "With respect, we could blight itself. We’re still chopping our way through the tall grass of AI and all this stuff."
The plan had been for Batgirl to lead to this Dark Knight taking centre stage in a Batman Beyond project, likely meaning we could have looked forward to the Bat Family being part of the now-defunct DCEU.
Instead, DC Studios has rebooted the franchise as the DCU, with a new Bruce Wayne set to take centre stage in The Brave and the Bold. Unfortunately, James Gunn and Safran still haven't found their Batman, and the movie, expected to be helmed by The Flash's Andy Muschietti, appears no closer to becoming a reality, even as The Batman Part II gears up to begin shooting.
Do you think Warner Bros. Discovery made a mistake by scrapping Batgirl?