thelesterlee
Batgirl is one of my favorite superheroes. She is one of the rare characters whose origin story isn’t the result of one of her parents exploding in a fire or whatever. She essentially volunteers to be Batman’s sidekick.
So I was hyped as hell when DC greenlit a Batgirl movie for HBO Max back in 2021. It was supposed to be starring Leslie Grace and was directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah—who directed Bad Boys 4 Life and some episodes of Ms. Marvel on Disney Plus.
Since that announcement, HBO Max has been under new leadership and the new regime has spent the last two years dismantling everything HBO-related for the sole purpose of saving a few pennies here and there. HBO has essentially become a money laundering operation that no longer cares about the quality of content they produce.
The new Warner Bros Discovery conglomerate exists exclusively to provide larger bonuses for the executives. Art is dead. It’s numbers and dollars and private jets.
Well, I thought they didn’t care about art until the real reason Batgirl didn’t come out was finally said this week in a recent interview.
Here’s what Peter Safran—the new co-chairman of CEO studios alongside James Gunn—said about the Batgirl movie:
“Batgirl’s a character that inevitably we will include in our story. On the Batgirl front, it’s not about late in the process of the film getting canceled. I saw the movie, and there are a lot of incredibly talented people in front of and behind the camera on that film. But that film was not releasable, and it happens sometimes. That film was not releasable. I actually think that [president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery David] Zaslav and the team made a very bold and courageous decision to cancel it because it would have hurt DC. It would have hurt those people involved.”
The movie was not releasable?? This whole time we thought the new CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery was a penny-pinching oligarch but nope, Batgirl was fucking trash and they couldn’t, in good conscious, release this movie in theatres and take people’s hard-earned dollars.
The bad news is, now this makes me want to watch this movie even more than before. I’m imagining it was the same quality as those Arrow and Flash shows on TV which is fine for TV but uh, DC movies are never going to be able to stand up to the MCU if Batgirl is Gossip Girl with some karate added.
Thankfully, I believe James Gunn and the new DC team understand how to make fun action movies and I’m sure Batgirl will show up in a Batman movie and it’ll be done properly.
Isn’t it so odd that DC fans were trying to burn down the country to see Zach Snyder’s Justice League but a movie starring a black girl gets canceled and I haven’t seen a single hashtag about it. Interesting…
Why was Batgirl cancelled? Leave a comment below. Respond on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Or shoot me an email at Deadseriousmailbag@gmail.com. Let’s chat, bay-beeeee.
