Death of a movie: Who killed Batgirl and why?

We are used to expensive films being cancelled late into pre-production. More than a few projects have, often for obscure legal reasons, remained suppressed decades after completion. But Warner Bros’ decision to shelve Batgirl is something else. “Worked in this town for three decades and this is some unprecedented s**t right here,” an unnamed “rival studio exec” told Justin Kroll of Deadline shortly after the news landed. Well, quite so.

Starring Leslie Grace as the eponymous DC hero, the picture — which began shooting in Glasgow two years ago — had, according to several sources, been screened to test audiences before news emerged of its imminent euthanasia. Batgirl was, in other words, more or less finished. Reports place the budget at somewhere between $70 million and $100 million.

It is now commonplace for substandard movies (or those so perceived) to be moved from theatrical release to streaming services alone. But Batgirl won’t even appear on HBO Max, the usual online destination for Warners’ films. It has been locked in a trunk and buried beneath the foundations of Wayne Manor. Let us never speak of it again.

The industry is still scratching its collective head. Initial reports in the New York Post were unequivocal. “[Test screenings] were said to be so poorly received by moviegoers that the studio decided to cut its losses and run,” the story stated. Subsequent stories in the trade papers offered a more complex narrative that suggests continuing confusion about release strategies in the post-Covid universe.

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Changes at the top of Warners are allegedly a factor. Batgirl was made under a previous regime dedicated to fleshing out content on HBO Max. That strategy precipitated the controversial decision to release all the studio’s 2021 theatrical slate simultaneously on that streaming service in the US. Denis Villeneuve, director of Dune, was among those unhappy about the policy. “I think it was a bad decision,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

When David Zaslav took over at Warner Bros Discovery, he expressed his support for maintaining the window between release in cinemas and on streaming services. “It builds a brand so when it does go to a streaming service there’s a view that [the title] has a higher quality that benefits the streaming service,” he said. The success of Warners’ The Batman earlier this year offered some justification for this strategy.

A report in Variety last week argued that Batgirl had fallen between two stools. The film was “apparently neither big enough to feel worthy of a major theatrical release nor small enough to make economic sense in an increasingly cut-throat streaming landscape”.

It is hard to know quite what “big enough” means here. Batgirl’s budget may be around half of that for The Batman, but you certainly couldn’t call it a modest production. The cast included JK Simmons as Commissioner James Gordon and Brendan Fraser as villain The Firefly. Bad Boys for Life, the last film from directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, was the highest-grossing US release of 2020 (okay, that year will forever have an asterisk beside it, but $426 million is still a packet). At any rate it is true that the studio would have to fork out somewhere in the region of $50 million to promote and distribute Batgirl throughout the planet.

Potentially unprofitable films have, however, been dispatched straight to video — as the old folks say — for 30 or 40 years. It happens now even with perfectly decent titles. This weekend, there is much fan muttering about Disney’s decision to send Prey, an excellent Predator prequel, straight to the Disney+ service. Turning Red, the better-reviewed of Pixar’s two 2022 animations, went directly to the same place, whereas Lightyear, a marginally less well received release, had a run in cinemas.

So what harm could it possibly do to unleash Batgirl on HBO Max in the US and on rental services in these territories? Here we enter the impenetrably complex and, for those not signed up to financial nerddom, wearyingly dull world of corporate taxation. That Variety report tells us “it will almost certainly take a tax write-down on both films, seen internally as the most financially sound way to recoup the costs”.

Unless salvaged by a campaign like the one that eventually persuaded Warners to put Zack Snyder’s version of Justice League on HBO Max (unlikely), Batgirl looks set to join that list of completed films never released before the everyday public. Jerry Lewis’s notorious Holocaust drama The Day the Clown Cried is top of the wanted list. It is now 13 years since Beeban Kidron’s Hippie Hippie Shake, a study of the 1960s Oz trials starring Cillian Murphy and Chris O’Dowd, failed to emerge, and nobody has yet offered a satisfactory reason for its continued non-appearance.

If the reports on its status as a tax write-down are correct, Batgirl may have met the most ignominious fate of all. It will have become a mere financial product. Like an option or a derivative. You wouldn’t wish that on even a Zack Snyder film.