Leslie Grace, the star of the unreleased Batgirl movie, is pushing back on the idea that the film, which had completed filming, was unreleasable. David Zaslav, the then newly-appointed CEO of the recently merged Warner Bros. Discovery company, made waves with a string of high-profile cancellations and removals, including some projects nearing completion like . The move proved unpopular with fans anticipating the movie’s release on HBO Max, but Peter Safran, one of the new co-heads of DC Studios, recently backed Zaslav’s decision, suggesting that releasing Batgirl would have damaged the DC brand. Grace rejects this notion, saying that the footage she saw of the film looked “incredible.”
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“I had my own meetings with Warner Bros. Film Group CEOs Pam Abdy and Mike De Luca, and they explained to me, on a granular level, what they felt about the project, things that were out of their hands, plans, and budgets that were set in place before they were even part of the team,” Grace tells Variety in a new interview. “There are a lot of things that I learned through the experience about moviemaking, that as an actress you have no control over. They weren’t really specific on anything creative in terms of what they felt about the film and how it would’ve hurt DC creatively. But I’m a human being, and people have perceptions and people read things. And when words are expressed very lightly about work that people really dedicated a lot of time to — not just myself but the whole crew — I can understand how it could be frustrating.”
She continues, explaining that filming Batgirl wasn’t without its challenges. However, that’s true of any film.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” she says. “In every film, there are obstacles, and our film was nothing short of that. Half of the shoot was night shoots in Scotland, where it never stops raining. So there were obstacles, but at the end of the day, because of the incredible crew, nothing that ever got in the way of us delivering what we knew we wanted to deliver for this film. At least from what I was able to see.”
Having seen a final cut of the film — or as close as the film is ever likely to get to one — Grace says, “That’s the one thing I asked for. I got to see the film as far as it got to; the film wasn’t complete by the time that it was tested. There were a bunch of scenes that weren’t even in there. They were at the beginning of the editing process, and they were cut off because of everything going on at the company. But the film that I got to see — the scenes that were there — was incredible. There was definitely potential for a good film, in my opinion. Maybe we’ll get to see clips of it later on.”
