At least we can see Batgirl in two-second snippets if Warner Bros. Discovery doesn’t plan to broadcast it.
Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s Batgirl movie lost its release on HBO Max so the studio could put it on a shelf as a tax write-off. It has been almost two months since Warner Bros. Discovery revolutionised the film industry by realising that you can make more money off of a movie by throwing it in the garbage than by releasing it. Leslie Grace, who plays Batgirl, has decided to just go ahead and start releasing some footage herself on TikTok, though she’s strictly sticking to behind-the-scenes clips that were recorded during production. As far as we know, very few people have actually seen anything from the movie since then, aside from anyone who attended one of the secret “funeral screenings” that the studio held over the summer.
Although you’ll have to click over to TikTok (via The Hollywood Reporter) to watch it, it’s still cool to see something connected to this movie that we might never get to see in its entirety. The series of clips feature Grace demonstrating some eye makeup that is unmistakably The Batman-like, several fight scenes (including a skillfully choreographed knife attack), and a final shot of her having fun in costume (with a cool pair of Bat-goggles that weren’t in the original suit teaser and some graffiti that looks somewhat like the Penguin).
The film would have included Grace in addition to Michael Keaton’s Batman (apparently setting this in the Burtonverse), J.K. Simmons’ Commissioner Gordon (apparently setting this in the Snyderverse), and Brendan Fraser as the antagonist Firefly (apparently setting this in the Fraserssance that we are all currently living in). Speaking of Fraser, he recently said that the decision to postpone Batgirl was the “canary in the coal mine” that led major studios to rethink the advantages of investing a lot of money in a film that will only be available on streaming services. (We may not be as obviously brilliant as David Zaslav, the head of Warner Bros. Discovery, but at some point you’d think that releasing it on a paid VOD platform would at least bring in some revenue from viewers who were interested or who wanted to support the cast and crew’s efforts.)
