Brendan Fraser has always been transparent about his disappointment in Warner Bros.’s decision to shelve “Batgirl“: the completed, but unreleased DC superhero movie that would have seen the Academy Award-winning actor play the villainous Firefly opposite Leslie Grace as the titular heroine. In an interview with the Associated Press on Nov. 19, Fraser opened up about what was lost for creatives and audiences when the film was blocked from release and what its cancellation communicates about the current state of Hollywood.
“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,” Fraser said. “I mean, with respect, we could blight itself.”
Directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, “Batgirl” was meant to be the next installment in the DC Extended Universe. Alongside Grace and Fraser, the movie was also supposed to introduce Jacob Scipio as Anthony Bressi and Ivory Aquino as Alysia Yeoh in the franchise and reprise J.K. Simmons as Jim Gordon and Michael Keaton as Batman.
Production took place in Scotland between November 2021 and March 2022, but while in post-production, Warner Bros. announced that it would not release the film as scheduled, opting to shelve it as a cost-cutting measure in Aug. 2022. Not a frame of footage has ever been screened publicly.
“A whole movie,” Fraser remarked. “I mean, there were four floors of production in Glasgow. I was sneaking into the art department just to geek out.”
The actor continued to talk about the cultural impact that the film could have made. “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.’” Grace would have been the first Batgirl to headline her own film and one of just a handful of women to get a standalone superhero movie in the male-dominated genre.
At the same time, Fraser also acknowledged that older fans would delight in seeing Keaton return as the Caped Crusader. “I mean, Michael Keaton came back as Batman. The Batman!” he said. Keaton made his debut as Batman in Tim Burton’s 1989 film, “Batman,” and reprised the role in its 1992 sequel, “Batman Returns.” He eventually donned the cape and cowl in the DCEU for the first time in 2023’s “The Flash.”
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With Warner Bros now for sale and the DC intellectual property revamped as DC Studios under James Gunn and Peter Safran’s leadership, the odds of “Batgirl” ever releasing seem even more dubious than they did two years ago.
Fraser won the Academy Award for his performance in 2022’s “The Whale.” He currently stars in “Rental Family” and is confirmed to reprise his role as Rick O’Connell from “The Mummy” in the series’ upcoming fourth installment.
From Variety US