Warner Bros. made headlines earlier this month for shelving Batgirl, its movie that was set to bring Barbara Gordon / Batgirl (Leslie Grace) into the modern DC movie universe. The move surprised fans, especially since the project had already wrapped principal photography and was in the throes of post-production. The film’s directors, Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi, have been vocal on social media about the decision, and how they were personally locked out of accessing Batgirl footage once the cancellation was made public. In a recent video posted to their Instagram accounts, Fallah and El Arbi shed more light on the circumstances surrounding the cancellation, including their efforts to try to record some of the footage onto their phones as a backup.
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“I was in Tetouan visiting the grave of my grandfather and grandmother,” Fallah explained. “When I was leaving, I picked up my phone and I saw a lot of messages. I got a call and they said ‘Batgirl is done.’”
“I was in Tangiers, in a hotel, honeymooning with my wife,” El Arbi echoed. “All the sudden, I got a phone call. Meanwhile, I was getting all these messages and they said that they’re going to kill the movie. When I heard that, I was shocked, because I didn’t even realize that was a possibility. It was like we were making movie history right there. I called our editor Martin Walsh right away and said ‘Yo, you got to back up that sh-t. Back it up! Copy the movie!’”
“Then Adil called me and said ‘Shoot it on you phone!’” Fallah continued. “I went on the server, and everything was blocked.”
“I apologize, that’s not the right thing to do,” El Arbi admitted. “But I was panicking, you know. It’s not good to do piracy. It was just ‘What do you do? To see that the movie was gone and that we didn’t have any access to the footage or weren’t able to see it for ourselves again, that was just pretty harsh.”
The duo also provided some insight on the status of the film itself, with the project reportedly being together enough to exist in recent “funeral screenings” for the cast and crew, but a lot still needing to be done to have it truly be complete.
“The movie wasn’t even done,” El Arbi revealed. “There was still a long way to go. There was a lot of work to be done… We were just starting to really get somewhere with the post-production.”
“There were no VFX, there were missing scenes,” Fallah added. “We were missing reshoots.”
Batgirl was directed by Fallah and Adil El Arbi, with a script written by Christina Hodson. The film would’ve starred Leslie Grace as Barbara Gordon / Batgirl, with JK Simmons reprising his role as Commissioner James Gordon, and Michael Keaton reprising his role as Bruce Wayne / Batman. Also joining the cast was Brendan Fraser as Firefly, Ivory Aquino as Alysia Yeoh, and Jacob Scipio, Rebecca Front, Corey Johnson, and Ethan Kai cast in currently-unknown roles.
What do you think of the newest update surrounding DC’s Batgirl cancellation? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
