Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav believes it was actually courageous of him and the studio to shelve movies like Batgirl.
The superhero movie, starring Leslie Grace as Batgirl, was filmed to be part of the extended DC Universe and was actually near completion before Warner Bros. decided to pull the plug. Speculation was rife as to why it was cancelled, with the general assumption back then being that Warner Bros. did so as a tax write-off due to a change in strategy within the studio.
Zaslav later explained that the studio ultimately did not "believe" the movie would succeed.
He has elaborated on his decision further, insisting Batgirl's cancellation was necessary.
“We’ve spent the $100 million dollars and if we don’t release it, it’s gone," he told journalists at a business conference this week.
"We don’t have any real benefit from it. The question is, should we take certain of these movies and open them in the theater and spend another $30 or $40 million to promote them? And Warner Bros. team and HBO made a number of decisions. They were hard. But when I look at the health of our company today, we needed to make those decisions. And it took real courage.
“What content is going to help us win? The content that wasn’t, we made a strategic decision on. It was difficult & painful... But it was necessary.”
READ MORE: Batgirl star Leslie Grace: The version of the movie I saw was INCREDIBLE
Leslie Grace would return as Batgirl
Grace admits she would return as the character if the opportunity arose despite being left devastated at Batgirl's cancellation.
"I mean, why not? Why not? Who knows what the future holds?" she said in a conversation with Yahoo.
"I have moved forward. I'm working on a lot of exciting things that feel really aligned with the path that I'm looking forward to just enjoying and building. And I'm very grateful to have had the experience of Batgirl and have met the people that I've met from that experience, and to have received the support that I, in some cases, didn't even know was there after the news of it not coming out."
Batgirl would have seen Michael Keaton's return as Bruce Wayne (which happened in The Flash) as well as Brendan Fraser playing Firefly.
Comments (0)