The directors behind the canceled “Batgirl” have revealed more about losing their reportedly $100 million film after Warner Bros. Discovery shut it down.
The film, which starred Leslie Grace as Batman’s female counterpart, recently wrapped shooting and was slated for a release on HBO Max this year. Grace was only the third Latina cast to star in a DC Comics superhero film and the first Afro-Latina to play Batgirl, according to Essence.
The decision to dump the movie was likely a way for Warner Bros. Discovery to use it as a tax write-down, sources told Variety.
The scrapped movie’s directors, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, told SKRIPT in an interview posted Monday that they tried to preserve the film once they found out about its cancellation.
″[El Arbi] called me and told me, ‘Go ahead! Shoot everything on your phone,’” Fallah recalled in French, as subtitled in English by SKRIPT. “I went on the server... and everything was blocked. There was no way to access the film. We were: ‘Fucking shit. All the scenes with Batman we didn’t get to keep.’”
The film would have featured former “Batman” star Michael Keaton, who is set to appear in “The Flash,” another superhero film that reportedly may be scrapped.
Fallah said he believed his film’s cancellation was unrelated to its quality or its cast.
“We were right in the middle of editing, there was still a lot of work to be done,” Fallah explained. “It was not like the movie was finished. But they told us it was a strategic change. New management. And they could save some cash.”
Watch the interview below: