Seven months ago, Warner Bros. Discovery cancelled the $90 million “Batgirl” film that had already been shot and was in early post-production, kicking off a wave of cost-cutting measures.
Those austerity measures took place not only within Warners, but at other streamers and studios as well as even finished, currently filming or already set projects weren’t safe. Even now “Batgirl” remains arguably the highest profile of the projects to get scrapped.
Directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah had only a few pickups and some post-production work to do when the news came that the project would be ditched as a tax write-off rather than releasing it.
We’ve already heard some of the cast and crew discuss what happened including Leslie Grace who plays Batgirl, Michael Keaton who reprises his Batman/Bruce Wayne role, and Brendan Fraser who plays the film’s villain Firefly.
Now stunt coordinator Scott Rogers, who also worked on the just released “John Wick: Chapter 4,” has revealed new details about a big action sequence from “Batgirl”. He tells Screen Rant he was drawn to thanks to its similarity to the “John Wick” movies:
“Yeah, the thing that drew me to that movie in the first place was that there are no superheroes. It’s a superhero movie with nobody with superpowers, so it was very grounded. It fits the John Wick world, which is the world that I really like, which is real, grounded, real live, not CG stunts.
The bad guy, Brendan Fraser’s character, was Firefly. We had these amazing flamethrowers, and we did this really great fight with flamethrowers.
And then we had this huge sequence on a firetruck with motorcycles, and 40-foot flamethrowers, and girls doing wheelie with the flames. It was just like doing John Wick. ‘Okay, we’re going to do what? 40-foot flamethrowers? Yes. Okay, how are we going to do that?’ It was great.
It’s unfortunate, but the beauty is I’ve learned a bunch and now I can go steal all of those stunts and go put them in another movie.”
Shot over months in Scotland, the cancellation of “Batgirl” was a heavy blow to all those involved but also a shock to the industry. As part of claiming it as a tax write-off, Warner Bros. Discovery cannot release or stream the film – leaving its legacy as one of the most famous unreleased films ever made.
