The entire cast of the ‘Batgirl’ movie has been left feeling utterly humiliated after Warner Bros. scrapped the $100 million movie without even giving them a heads up first. The film, which had already been in production for months in the town of Glasgow, UK, was set to star newbie Leslie Grace as Batgirl alongside Brendan Fraser as Firefly, with Michael Keaton reprising his role as Batman. Warner Bros has said that the reason for scrapping the flick was due to the studio’s ‘leadership’s strategic shift’ while other reports have stated that the film performed abysmally in early screenings.
But nobody at Warner Bros had the decency to let the actors and filmmakers know that ‘Batgirl’ will never see the light of day. The cast and crew is said to have found out about the film’s demise by reading about it in the media, just like everyone else. “They had no idea the movie was being shelved,” revealed an industry insider. “That’s a giant problem.”
‘Batgirl’ Cast ‘HUMILIATED’ After Warner Bros Scraps The $100 Movie Without Telling Them
The actors are seemingly seething behind the scenes, telling those in their inner circle that it has been ‘humiliating’ and ‘disappointing’ to be the last to know that they had essentially been fired. To add insult to injury, Brendan Fraser was still promoting the film and his role as Firefly at GalaxyCon in North Carolina over the weekend.
The directors of ‘Batgirl’, Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi, were also blindsided by Warner Bros decision to throw away the film after all of the time and money that was invested into it. The duo released a lengthy statement to social media saying, “We are shocked and saddened by the news. We still can’t believe it. As directors, it is critical that our work be shown to audiences, and while the film was far from finished, we wish that fans all over the world would have had the opportunity to see and embrace the final film themselves.”
Leslie Grace has also addressed the movie being canned, but she appeared to take the high road by being gracious for the experience alone. “On the heels of the recent news about our movie Batgirl, I am proud of the love, hard work and intention all of our incredible cast and tireless crew put into this film over seven months in Scotland,” she wrote on Instagram. “I feel blessed to have worked among absolute greats and forged relationships for a lifetime in the process! To every Batgirl fan — THANK YOU for the love and belief, allowing me to take on the cape and become, as Babs said best, ‘my own damn hero!”.
While it’s extremely uncommon for a studio to shelve such an expensive movie without even making it available to stream, the fact that it tested poorly likely factored into the decision. “It did test poorly,” entertainment critic Johnny Oleksinski admitted. “It tested in the 30s, which as anybody knows, if you test in the 30s, you fail math and have to redo eighth grade.” While bad reviews have hardly ever stood in the way of a movie being released, Oleksinski simply conceded, “Batgirl is a lousy movie”.
