Warner Bros. quite unexpectedly completely abandoned the DC Comics Batgirl / Batgirl movie, despite the fact that the $90 million budget comic book movie was already in the final stages of post-production. This was reported by several leading publications, including The Post and Variety , citing sources close to the studio.
The Batgirl movie starring American pop singer Leslie Grace was filmed specifically for the HBO Max online cinema, but now it will not be released there or anywhere else. Warner Bros. and DC Comics decided not to release it on streaming or in theaters. The list of American films that never made it to the audience is not very long , and usually getting there is not accidental – take, for example, “The Fantastic Four” in 1994 or stand-up comedy Bill Cosby 77 from 2014 from Netflix. At the same time, The Post and Variety sources report that Batgirl has been sent to this list by the new management of the combined media corporation Warner Bros. discovery.
The CEO is reportedly Warner Bros. Discovery David Zaslav and head of Warner Bros. Michael De Luca is looking to cut costs and focus on theatrical blockbusters rather than digital streaming releases. In other words, after the merger of Discovery and Warner Bros. revisited the strategy and shifted the focus back to films for cinemas.
According to The Wrap , test screenings went poorly and WB Discovery generally did not receive the project very well. Despite the reshoots and the extra money spent on production, management decided Batgirl wasn’t worth the hassle and canceled the release entirely. The decision itself came as a complete surprise and shock to everyone – the head of the competing film studio, on condition of anonymity, called the decision to cancel an already filmed film unprecedented, and the directors of the film Adil El Arbi and Bilal Falla, known for the third part of Bad Boys, learned about the cancellation of the release after the fact when we were at Adil’s wedding in Morocco.
According to Variety, management thus decided to write off taxes and cut their costs as much as possible. Advertising for the theatrical release of Betdovka in the US and other countries would have cost the studio another $30-50 million, if not more. In addition to Leslie Grace, Batgirl also stars Michael Keaton, J.K. Simmons, and Brendan Fraser.
As The Verge recalls, in 2020, DC Films president Walter Hamada introduced a new (at the time) strategy – the company responded to the Disney MCU with two of its own media franchises: the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) and the DC Films multiverse. The idea was to release up to four films in theaters each year, with an additional one or two HBO Max exclusives. Shortly thereafter, the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world and derailed all plans for DC Films.
When Warner Media launched HBO Max, one of the key components of its strategy to promote its own online cinema was DC movies, in particular the acclaimed director’s cut of Zack Snyder’s superhero movie Justice League (2017). And recently, Rolling Stone published material that the director owes most of all to bots and fake accounts for the successful campaign in support of Snyderkat. While the investigation has been heavily criticized on social media by fans and industry alike, the scandal still complicates a potential campaign to save Batgirl.
