The entertainment industry was rocked by the news that Warner Bros had cancelled the Batgirl movie earlier this month, despite reports the film cost $90 million to make and was pretty much ready to go. Now, it has emerged that the studio may have actually deleted the footage from the upcoming action movie from its servers.
The Batgirl movie was intended to release directly to the streaming service HBO Max, but the merger of Warner Bros and Discovery saw that plan change dramatically. New CEO David Zaslav reportedly has his sights set on ensuring all DC movies are more coherently linked, and are fit for large scale theatrical releases. By all accounts, the quality of the actual movie had nothing to do with the decision.
In an interview with Skript, the directors of the project, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah have spoken candidly about their thought process upon hearing the news. What is most shocking of all, is the claim that when they tried to retrieve the footage from their superhero movie, it had been deleted from the Warner Bros server.
Fallah recalled how El Arbi asked him to salvage some of the footage on his phone when the news broke of their movie being cancelled. When he got access to the server though, all of the footage was gone.
“No, we have nothing. Adil called and told me, ‘Go ahead! Shoot everything on your phone!’ I went on the server and everything was gone. We were [like]… ‘F**ing shit!’ We did not [even] keep [the scenes] with Batman in it,” Fallah explained.
It looks increasingly likely that the thriller movie will never see the light of day at this stage. Even if there was some footage somewhere, the directors admitted they “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.”
It’s a shame we will never see Batman actor Michael Keaton mentoring Batgirl now, and we can’t begin to comprehend how the team behind the project must feel.
For a future DC project that is happening, check out our guide to the Black Adam release date, or dive into the world of Gotham some more with our list of the Batman movies in order.