Last month, it was reported that DC and HBO Max Parent, Warner Bros. Discovery, decided to not released Batgirl in any form of capacity. Despite the fact the film was about 95% complete and be in it’s released form, it will not be available to watch on HBO Max or in theaters. Just like that, the work that directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, screenwriter Christina Hudson, and cast members Leslie Grace, J.K. Simmons, Michael Keaton, etc.., had all been for nothing.
That in of itself is awful but you would at least assume that directors Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi or the studio would still have the footage to preserve in case of a potential revival of the project. Well, you would be wrong about that! According to co-director Bilall Fallah, that footage is long gone. Just yesterday, it was confirmed that Fallah was trying to preserve whatever footage they could onto their phone but they could never find any existing files from the film. It had all been deleted. Unless there’s some Toy Story 2-like miracle here where someone on production conveniently had some sort of back-up drive that include the majority of the existing footage that was shot, Batgirl is basically 100% dead. Just completely vanished into thin air! Almost has if it never existed at all!
Talk about wasting a ton of time and money on basically nothing! All that work in pre-production, production, and post-production might as well never happened! Aside from getting some solid paychecks from the higher-ups, this Batgirl movie is basically a good three to four years that everyone involved with it will never get back. Going through all that trouble to get 70-year old Michael Keaton back as Batman (Although, he may still make an appearance in The Flash) and the first on-screen Batgirl in forever turned out to be a waste. As terrible as that is, that exposes the biggest and scariest thing about Hollywood. No movie is every 100% safe to be released in any existing form!
Granted, Batgirl was not the only project recently that had been cancelled from Warner Bros. It’s been reported by the unfortunate CEO of Warner Bros Discovery, David Zaslav, that a number of planned content for HBO Max had either been cancelled or put on hold due to being used as tax write-offs and putting more focus on theatrical productions that they believe will benefit them more in the future. These other projects include Scoob!, Holiday Hunt, Little Ellen, Batman: The Caped Crusader, The Amazing World of Gumball: The Movie, Merry Little Batman, The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, and Bye Bye Bunny (Looney Tunes Musical). While some of these are expected to be shopped by other networks/SVOD’s, others have been confirmed to be officially cancelled. What makes it even worse is that some of these projects were either finished or about to be such as the first three I mentioned but those have been scrapped with no intended release dates for any of them. While Batgirl is far from the only victim of this controversial business decision by WB Discovery, you’d be hard-pressed to find one that has suffered the most.
There had been folks that claimed that the reason this decision was made was due to the negative test screening that the film received, scoring in the low 60s (a similar score that the original It and Shazam received) and because of that, WB felt like it wouldn’t be releasable. That sounds like a very ill-conceived reason for wanting to shut down production on that as there has been numerous movies over the years that still made it’s way to theaters despite bad test screenings (Remember when the initial test screenings of Wonder Woman that rendered the movie “unwatchable”?) I don’t buy that theory as to why that was the reason it got canned or any business related theory.
Even if Batgirl was legit bad, so what? There has been plenty of movies over the years that had been released despite being bad. Hell, Warner Bros has released plenty of content recently that got a mid-to-negative reception. Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad, Justice League (Theatrical Cut), Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, The Legend of Tarzan, Geostorm! All movies that were badly received and/or didn’t make the money that was expected of them yet they were all able to find their ways in theaters or on streaming. I can’t imagine Batgirl doing as much damage as any one of those from either a business or critical standpoint.
No matter what way you look at it, this is a dumb and poor move by Zaslav and company. Not only is it a costly one by throwing away millions of dollars with no guarantee of getting any of it back but it’s also that will now question the leadership of that company. Why in the world would anyone want to work with them now? Why bother working for a company that can decide to just cancel the project you’ve worked so hard and long on whenever they want to? It just gives a back look with WB and anyone else associated with it. What makes this an even more scary scenario is that this is not the only time this has happened in recent memory?
There was Sony who have cancelled a handful of projects (a CGI Popeye movie that would have had Tom Kenny doing the voice of the character) in favor of other ones (The Emoji Movie). There was Disney who shut down Blue Sky Studios and cancelled Nimona along with other planned future projects from that studio. It’s a very scary thought with how nothing is guaranteed to finish with filmmaking in Hollywood.
When you sign on to a project with a studio, that gives that as much control as they want on the thing you are working on. While you might get to write your own story and apply your own individual voice to it, it is the studio that decide the kind of budget and time constraints that the movie you are making will include. Similar to how whenever someone makes a pitch to a tv studio and it gets greenlights, once you agreed to a project with a company, then it’s (mostly) out of your hands. You’ll be able to get a chance to work on it but it will be up to the higher ups to decide if they want to continue funding the project or not. Some are lucky enough to see it until the very end, others are not so fortunate.
As much as many folks are outraged over Zaslav and Warner Bros for these puzzling, head-scratching moves, this is something that has been going on in Hollywood for awhile and it won’t stop anytime soon. Whether that’s because the people in charge have too much power that no can stop them or some other matter, this should be a lesson on the expectations of Hollywood and in life. Just because you work really hard at something does not mean you will get to complete it. Many people have gone through this process and many of them were met with heartbreaking results. It’s only a matter of being able to try until you are able to overcome that failure that it will matter in the long run.
Regardless of what you think of this whole situation with Batgirl, this should be a huge wake-up call to inspiring filmmakers that you may not be able to see your project until the very end. No matter how hard you’ve worked on it, it could be as good as gone in the snap of Thano’s finger if it’s deemed not good enough from the studio that you are working for. It’s disturbing but it’s also reality. Nothing is ever safe in Hollywood!
Link On Other Cancelled Shows/Projects:
https://tvline.com/lists/hbo-max-cancelled-shows-2022-list-warner-bros-discovery-merger/
Link On Batgirl’s Test Screenings:
https://www.gamesradar.com/batgirl-test-screening-audience-score-it/
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