Leslie Grace continues to put on a brave face about her scrapped Brendan Fraser fight
Leslie Grace praises Batgirlco-star Brendan Fraser as she continues to mourn the DC film's untimely cancellation
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Nowadays, a streaming site will cancel and disappear any kind of content on a whim—finished films, renewed shows, beloved cartoons. But Batgirl was, as star Brendan Fraser put it, “the canary in the coal mine” for this current era of utter disrespect towards commissioned, completed work. Setting aside the supposed quality of the film (something that has been debated and speculated on since the cancellation), it remains a bummer that we’ll never see Fraser’s Firefly face off with Leslie Grace’s Batgirl, something the heroine knows all too well.
“I truly had one of [the best] experiences with Batgirl. In terms of the experience of shooting, we were all so excited for people to see a lot of the action, a lot of the practical shots we did with fire. Our movie was full of practical fire, which was really hard to shoot,” Grace reflects in a new interview with Collider. “Brendan [Fraser], our villain, our Firefly, he was just so outstanding and so happy that he’s having this incredible moment—this Brenaissance as everyone says. He’s amazing. He’s one of the kindest people in the world, and I felt so blessed to have him as my sparring partner. We had so many amazing action scenes together where we were beating each other up, but hugging in between takes because he’s just so sweet.”
She continued, “So I would’ve loved people to see those moments, but you know what? You have the experience, and you keep on rolling, and I feel so blessed, all in all, that I have those memories and hopefully maybe in some future, some clips will arise and people will get to enjoy a little bit of it. But for now, we’ll just have to keep it going as it going in comic folklore, I guess, with all of our memories and our stories while we can.”
Fraser expressed similar sentiments back in October, when he told Variety, “It’s tragic. It doesn’t engender trust among filmmakers and the studio. Leslie Grace was fantastic. She’s a dynamo, just a spot-on performer. Everything that we shot was real and exciting and just the antithesis of doing a straightforward digital all green screen thing. They ran firetrucks around downtown Glasgow at 3 in the morning and they had flamethrowers. It was a big-budget movie, but one that was just stripped down to the essentials.”
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As someone who lived in Glasgow for several years… filming at 3am would indeed allow us to see some excellent, er, practical effects. And fire, probably.
“So, you see, the script didn’t originally call for Batgirl to get stabbed by a tweaker, but we saw a great opportunity to change the direction of the scene and ran with it!”
I went to Glasgow once. I remember it much as one recalls a dream… or a nightmare. I was on a budget flight to Norway, when a storm hit and forced us to ditch in Glasgow Prestwick. I was stranded, and it’s so hilly up there you can’t get any signal on your car phone. It looked bad…it looked like I was going to have to spend the night in Glasgow. The cabin crew suggested we all go out and club it. I had no option; it was that or one of their B&Bs. I figured it’d be safer on the streets.For the first time ever I saw the Scotch in their natural habitat, and it weren’t pretty. I’d seen them huddling in stations before being loud, but… this time I was surrounded. Everywhere I went it felt like they were watching me; fish-white flesh puckered by the Highland breeze; tight eyes peering out for fresh meat; screechy, booze-soaked voices hollering out for a taxi to take ‘em halfway up the road to the next all-night watering hole. A shatter of glass; a round of applause; a sixteen-year-old mother of three vomiting in an open sewer, bairns looking on, chewing on potato cakes.I ain’t never going back… not never.
My aunt lives in Scotland…she says it’s quite nice.
You know, taking one extremely limited experience amongst a people in one place with a tiny sample size and extrapolating it to an entire population is a time-honored tradition. It’s also the reason I’ll never go back to Nebraska- a gas station attendant wouldn’t accept my credit card when my snack purchase was below $10. So fuck Nebraska and everyone who lives in it.
Well she’s wrong.
(Dagless’s glowering frown)
Well, she’s wrong.
Scotch is a drink. People from Scotland are Scottish..
James Joyce is that you
Ah, that’s the good stuff. I got his book for Christmas but haven’t started it yet!
Sanchez: Jesus *Christ*!
“But Batgirl was, as star Brendan Fraser put it, “the canary in the coal mine” for this current era of utter disrespect towards commissioned, completed work.”
It’s been well-documented that Batgirl was *NOT* completed.
Leslie Grace praises Batgirlco-star Brendan Fraser as she continues to mourn the DC film’s untimely cancellationThere needs to be a space between Batgirl and co-star.
Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na na Batgirlco-star!
I think there was a merger between BatgirlCo and Waystar RoyCo
Interesting. Today James Gunn more or less came right out and said the movie was a hunk of shit. So, there’s that.
I very much doubt that Gunn saw Batgirl. There was at least a full month between the private screenings and Gunn’s hiring announcement, so unless he mentioned somewhere that they brought him in to watch it as part of the interview process, I’m going to have to imagine that his comment that everything before his hiring was shit is referring to the general handling of the IP, and not to specific, unreleased products.
He 100% saw it and threw it out. There’s a big difference between when he was hired and when they announced he was hired. He was briefed on everything, scripts, preproduction outlines, and saw the cuts of what they had already in production. Even if he didn’t give the kill the movie himself, it certainly would have his blessing.
Oh, is that what he told you?
Batgirl was announced as canned August 2nd 2022. Gunn and Safran were announced as leads of DC Studios on October 25th. Your claim that Gunn had control over this is the figment of a diseased mind.
Want to tone it down about it? This is a discussion about pop culture.
I know a lot of people like and trust Gunn. Hell, *I* like and trust Gunn. But that statement sounded like a bunch of face-saving horseshit to me. Insist that the movie wasn’t theater-oriented but everyone involved is awesome so they’re more willing to play nice. Dude is politicking HARD.
Though he also said the Flash movie is still ongoing so… yeah.
I mean, even excluding all the stuff surrounding Miller, their portrayal of Flash wasn’t even a quarter as good as the person who played him on the CW.
The guy who shitcanned it has given him and Safran the keys to the kingdom. I’m pretty sure those keys came with an obligation for both of them to happy talk the upcoming slate of non-Gunn DC movies the studio is already pot-committed to, and to have Zaslav’s back no matter what.
That wasn’t Gunn, it was the other C-level suit.
He said it was “not releasable”, he didn’t say it was “not releasable due to quality reasons”.
“Not releasable” could mean all kinds of things.
But guys, c’mon. Why do we always talk about these kinds of conversations as though they are themselves comic book lore, wherein we attribute villainous motives to one set of people and virtuous motives to another set of people and then imagine what their statements truly mean as though they’re trippy Jack Kirby-esque coded secrets? There’s literally no reason to think that a PR statement or the associated messaging is required to be true. If it contains nothing fraudulent or disprovable, they’ll say it if the PR dividend is there.
The cancellation is to take advantage of the write-off, yeah? Writing something off means recognising that the thing has reduced in value – that’s quite easy to do in this case, because the business strategy has shifted to theatrical experiences: it’s honestly valid to claim the film is worth less than it used to be, because they can no longer monetize it the way they previously thought they could. The reasons it won’t work in the theatre have nothing to do with quality – lord knows these people will gladly release reprehensible unwatchable trash theatrically if the money’s in it.
I can certainly think of plenty brilliant TV programming for which the claim “it won’t work in theatres” holds true. If it wasn’t shot for theatres, if it wasn’t contracted or costed for theatres, and if making further investment to improve its theatrical viability (say by renegotiating contracts, or just funding rewrites and reshoots) is more expensive than this course of action, then of course they have to cancel it.
Also everybody keeps talking about this as though production and/or distribution costs (inc marketing) are the entirety of the financial impact this film would have. That’s why all those annoying “this makes no sense, just release it bro” hack articles stick in my craw more than they ought to. You better believe these guys would release a shitty-quality $90 million streaming film if they thought there was a profit in it.
The single most likely reason it’s not releasable is because the contract will trigger particular things on the completion or release date. That’s pretty standard.
So if the film were to be completed or released, then all these contractual requirements kick in, in all different contracts for all different people. A bunch of commercial business arrangements start. Bonuses get activated, option periods go live, minimum guarantees start, the clock starts ticking on licensing periods, various obligations activate, and so on and so on and so on.
Most likely, at the end of the day it’s the ongoing associated costs and agreements they’d be bound to on release which have rendered it unreleasable. Those could eat up millions over a number of years with nothing to show for it, and they’d be unable to do other things with Batgirl while they wait for the current contracts to expire either.
So it’s not actually that remarkable that it’s more cost-effective to kill it dead and pay out the contract penalties etc. If your only choices are: release it theatrically or write it off, you’d find that option B is the more cost effective for just about everything made for streaming/TV, really.
I really like Leslie Grace. I’ve only seen her in In the Heights, which had some problems (a bit long, though I’ve still watched it multiple times), but she was very engaging in her role.