The current climate at Warner Bros has been tense since a big merger between the studio and Discovery took place. CEO David Zaslav has been making headlines with a series of unpopular and shocking decisions. One of the more controversial ones, if not the biggest so far, is the cancelation of a movie that had already wrapped its principal photography – the now notoriously canceled Batgirl.
Recently, the directors of the movie, Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi, gave an interview on the French entertainment YouTube channel, Skript. In this video, they talk about how they tried to salvage some footage from the film, but unfortunately, Warner Bros has blocked it from their server. They wanted to at least preserve the scenes with Keaton’s Batman. The Direct transcribes the translated interview, as Fallah explains,
Adil called and told me, ‘Go ahead! Shoot everything on your phone!’ I went on the server… Everything was gone. We were [like]… ‘F**ing shit!’… We did not [even] keep [the scenes] with Batman in it.”
The Batgirl directors explain that they wouldn’t have been able to release the finished product as is because they still needed to do reshoots and add visual effects to complete the movie. They add that Warner Bros suits had assured them that it was not a personal or artistic decision (assuming they didn’t want to burn the bridge too much with the directors), but it was an unfortunate side of the business,
The guys from Warner Bros. told us it was not a talent problem on our part or the actress [Leslie Grace], or even the quality of the movie. We were right in the middle of editing. There was a lot of work to get done, so it was not like the movie was finished! Warner Bros. told us the cancellation was a strategic change, a shifting in management so they could save some bucks.”
While another lost WB/DC movie, Zack Snyder’s Justice League, did eventually come out thanks to an outpouring of support from fans, such an outcome seems unlikely here. Since Batgirl was jettisoned as a tax write-off, the film will not be released in any fashion, no matter how much the fans campaign.
Do you think any more Batgirl footage will ever see the light of day?