UPDATED 8/4, 2:20 p.m. ET: Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah released a statement after their Batgirl film was shelved by Warner Bros.
“We are saddened and shocked by the news. We still can’t believe it. We wish that fans would’ve had the opportunity to see and embrace the film,” they wrote.
See original story below.
Batgirl, the DC film that was scheduled to be released on HBO Max later this year, has been shelved.
The Wrap reports Warner Bros. Discovery will no longer be releasing the Leslie Grace-starring feature, which was directed by Bad Boys for Life filmmakers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, who also just turned in excellent work on Ms. Marvel. The announcement arrives after the project, which had a budget that reportedly ballooned from $70-80 million up to $90 million due to COVID-19 protocols, had already completed shooting.
Michael Keaton was set to return to his Batman role decades after hanging up the cape, which he’ll also do in The Flash. Despite a string of arrests and allegations surrounding star Ezra Miller, that movie has not been scrapped.
According to an insider, Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav believed Batgirl “simply did not work,” adding that the decision had nothing to do with the cast or directors. Deadline adds the decision “falls in line with the mandate put down by the new WB regime to cut back on the feature films premiering on the streamer and deciding which films will be released theatrically and which will be shelve.” That story’s writer, Justin Kroll, subsequently tweeted that a “rival studio exec” was “floored” by the development and said they’d “worked in this town for three decades and this is some unprecedented shit right here.”
It appears Warner Bros. determined Batgirl’s fate due to its desire to refocus on theatrical releases rather than creating movies for HBO Max. One insider told the New York Post the studio scrapped the film after test screenings, saying “Batgirl is going to be irredeemable.” Others on Twitter are claiming they saw screenings that yielded positive reactions, and generally mourning the project and questioning WB’s logic.
Batgirl, which was originally announced as an HBO Max exclusive but later was expected to receive a theatrical release, would’ve seen Leslie Grace, 27, make her return to the big screen after last year’s breakthrough role in the movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning musical In The Heights. Its cast also included Brendan Fraser as villain Firefly and J.K. Simmons as Commissioner Gordon.
Grace has yet to comment on the development, although her pinned tweet is still an image of herself in costume with a Batgirl: Year One quote about being underestimated:
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