Remember when David Zaslav and Warner Bros. Discovery just completely cancelled and shelved the nearly completed Batgirl back in 2022? Oh, you can’t forget? Us neither. Now, The Mummy star Brendan Fraser has opened up about what he thinks the film’s cancellation means for the state of the industry.
Fraser played villain Firefly in the unreleased Batgirl film, a role he has said in the past was “great fun.” Unfortunately, fans will never see it.
“A whole movie,” he remarked to Associated Press in a recent interview. “I mean, there were four floors of production in Glasgow. I was sneaking into the art department just to geek out.”
Fraser added: “The tragedy of that is that there’s a generation of little girls who don’t have a heroine to look up to and go, ‘She looks like me.’ I mean, Michael Keaton came back as Batman. The Batman! The product — I’m sorry, ‘content’ — is being commodified to the extent that it’s more valuable to burn it down and get the insurance on it than to give it a shot in the marketplace. I mean, with respect, we could blight itself.”
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When Warner Bros. scrapped the film in 2022 as a tax write-off, it claimed the decision was due to cost-cutting measures enacted to protect the company’s bottom line. Naturally, this unprecedented choice caused major backlash in the industry, with gutted reactions from directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, and star Leslie Grace. DC Studios co-CEO Peter Safran went on to claim in 2023 that the movie “was not releasable” and “would have hurt DC.”
The company went on to shelve Coyote vs. Acme the following year, but ultimately allowed the picture to be shopped around for new distribution, which will be handled by Ketchup Entertainment for a 2026 worldwide theatrical release.
“I got the chance to watch it, and it was a phenomenal film,” Jacob Scipio, one of the film’s stars, told The Direct last month. “Man, I’m really sad the world never got to see it. But you know, you never know. You never know.”
In August, Michael Keaton, who as Fraser mentioned reprised his role as Batman in Batgirl, admitted he was not all that bothered when the movie fell by the wayside. GQ asked Keaton whether he found the fate of Batgirl disappointing. The short answer was “no.” He was unfazed by the cancellation but did admit to feeling bad for the movie’s directors, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah.
“No, I didn’t care one way or another. Big, fun, nice check,” Keaton said while, according to the outlet, rubbing his fingers together in a money gesture resembling the act of clutching dollar bills.
“I like those boys. They’re nice guys,” he added about Batgirl’s directing duo. “I pull for them. I want them to succeed, and I think they felt very badly, and that made me feel bad. Me? I’m good.”
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Keaton, who many regard as the best live-action Batman, starred as the Dark Knight in Tim Burton’s 1989 movie of the same name before returning for the 1992 sequel Batman Returns. He then dipped out of the franchise because Joel Schumacher had a new creative vision for the third film, leaving the role open for Val Kilmer.
However, Keaton didn’t hang up the cape and cowl for good, as he returned to the role again in 2022’s The Flash. Batgirl would have been next on the DCEU slate if Warner Bros. hadn’t cancelled it, coming out ahead of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and Joker: Folie à Deux.
A set photo showed Grace and Keaton standing face-to-face in full costume in a scene that presumably played during the film’s funeral screening, acting as a send-off for the movie before it got locked in the vault.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.