Warner Bros. Discovery reportedly trying to smooth things over with Batgirl’s Leslie Grace
Batgirl fallout and DC restructuring chaos continues to plague the company
Aux News Batgirl
Could it be that we haven’t seen the last of Leslie Grace’s Batgirl after all? An interesting question, seeing as how we never even really saw the first of Leslie Grace’s Batgirl. The abrupt cancellation of her film sent shockwaves through the industry, and couldn’t have endeared the new Warner Bros. Discovery regime to the young star.
According to a new Variety report, newly installed Warner Bros. Pictures Group chiefs Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy have been brainstorming how to make amends with Grace, and allegedly haven’t ruled out having her play the role of Barbara Gordon in a future DC project. (Would you want to play a supporting role in a company’s superhero film after your character’s spotlight moment was written off for tax purposes?) If not Batgirl, the outlet claims they might “at least” offer for her to “star in another Warner Bros. production.” Good luck with that!
Variety offered a bit more info about the doomed Batgirl test screening as well, specifying it was a “10-week director’s cut” that tested so low and that “practically all movies are in rough shape that early in post-production.” Further, Warner Bros. Discovery deemed it a “waste of money” to do reshoots that would make the film better suited for theatrical, a fact which will surely have Leslie Grace rushing to get back in business with these guys.
DeLuca and Abdy also reportedly want current DC Films president Walter Hamada to stay on as the guy to usher in David Zaslav’s “10-year plan,” but Batgirl was viewed as Hamada’s last straw with the company after getting entangled with Zack Snyder’s Justice League drama. Variety suggests Greg Berlanti and Dan Lin’s names have been thrown in the ring for the role, but it doesn’t sound like either man is eager to take on the job.
Besides Batgirl, there haven’t been any other significant cancellations, despite Zaslav’s hints at a full overhaul. Still, that doesn’t mean any of the current development slate is safe–even The Flash could end up on the cutting room floor, despite WB Discovery’s extraordinary attempts to ignore Ezra Miller’s bad behavior. The only new project to get a greenlight under the new regime is Joker: Folie à Deux starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, which a Variety insider hilariously stresses “is more like A Star Is Born than In the Heights.” That new DC boss will clearly have their work cut out for them.
67 Comments
Start your bets now on whether she winds up in the MCU or Star Wars.
I think MCU is awfully likely, and as a lifelong DC fan, I would love to see her find success at Marvel. The new guy at WB is garbage.
The New guy at WB is a factualist.
MCU already got Ratcatcher 2’s Daniela Melchior for GoTG3. Though that could just wind up being a small cameo like Pom Klementieff’s random dancer in The Suicide Squad.
I did a search for Latina superheroes and it seems White Tiger would be a great addition to the Daredevil/Defenders thing they may have cooking.
She’ll be cast as White Tiger before the year is out, probably with a one episode appearance in Daredevil.
That would work really well; Del Toro was namedropped in Jessica Jones S1.
that would be cool.
If they cast her as the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (sorry Kendrick, but you’re too old to play Doreen now) and hire Ryan North to write it I swear I’ll go and see it if at least 5 times!
If they cast her as the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (sorry Kendrick, but you’re too old to play Doreen now) and hire Ryan North to write it I swear I’ll go and see it if at least 5 times!
A black person starring in a SW project is basically machoistic career move at this point.
mcu seems way more likely just in terms of how many different projects they have coming up. could be both, of course
“How about we offer you a role in another project that definitely will not get cancelled, too?”How are stars / creatives ever supposed to trust WB again with current leadership?
Yeah, anyone actually involved in this fiasco won’t trust WB for quite a long time, even if they manage to ditch Vaslav sometime in the future. Anyone not involved but still working in the industry is probably going to start shopping their skills elsewhere.That said, if I’m Leslie Grace and these assholes get on their knees and wash my feet, I’d take a promise of a future Batgirl role. She did get paid for her work after all, and she’d be in a unique position to negotiate even better pay a second time. If she liked the character, she could have another chance to play it, and then a mountain of free publicity about the role that was/wasn’t.And if they try to pawn off some sort of substitute role as the villain in Fantastic Beasts: Shadows and Biscuits she would be entirely within her rights to tell them to ask Ezra to do it.
I don’t know many people that wanted to see a made for TV version of a Batgirl they never saw in any comic book or cartoon. But you tell em’.
Zaslav promises to not pull the football away this time.
lol
They do there job and they get paid. Zaslav is weeding out the weak links to form a better whole.
I’m all for day of date streaming as a viewer but from a corporate perspective pissing off Christopher Nolan and losing him was the stupidest unforced error.
Exactly. What an astoundingly myopic decision, and to think there’d be no repercussions from it. This has basically been THE entertainment story for like four weeks running now. I don’t know why shareholders aren’t howling for his head yet.
Variety offered a bit more info about the doomed Batgirl
test screening as well, specifying it was a “10-week director’s cut”
that tested so low and that “practically all movies are in rough shape
that early in post-production.”
But a bunch of guys online said it was an irredeemably horrible film and that even though the same was said about early cuts of Black Adam, there’s no point in letting Batgirl get released. So based on this info it sounds like random people on the internet give opinions on things they don’t know about and just blindly parrot talking points to fit their own myopic narrative? I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU!
A podcast I listened to about this had a source who claimed to be at the screening, saying Batgirl looked and played out like a TV pilot and the stakes were very small. The main question the WB suits were pushing was “Does this feel big? Theatrical?” And the answer was a resounding no. That’s where I think the “irredeemable” narrative is coming from. With some tweaks and reshoots it would have been adequate for HBO Max, but there was nothing that could be done to raise it to the level for a successful theatrical release.
Given it was never intended to be a theatrical release, I don’t see the issue.
Seeing as how the new WBD brass decided it was theatrical release or or tax write off for the project, it wound up being a tremendous issue.
Finding “the stakes were small” to be a bad thing is funny. One of the things I love about Ant-Man & The Wasp was the relatively low stakes. Same with Shang-Chi whose stakes were also pretty low until the end. I honestly hate the idea that all these superhero movies need to be high stakes.
Agreed, it’s honestly what I loved about Ms Marvel. Love it or hate it, I enjoyed that its stakes didn’t’ fully involve a huge world ending, multiverse shattering, must cross over with every other property story. There was a brief thing with the stupidly named clandestines, then back to a teenager learning their powers and navigating life.
also ‘low stakes’ is on-brand for batgirl, too right? like the whole point is she’s gonna be dealing with smaller scale stuff.
That… totally makes sense. It can’t be reforged into what they want, so it’s irredeemable, but is probably totally fine on it’s actual merits.
Test screenings are notoriously not reliable anyway- the sample of the public isn’t truly random, it’s not really large enough, it’s never been good statistical data. They can point to specific things worth fixing / give you some new angles just because it’s someone from the outside seeing the film.
I read that the reason we got so much Sarii in Prey was because test audiences responded really well to her, and they wanted more time with her. And I think that’s a great use of test audiences, finding individual elements that are working or not, and adjusting from there. But I just can’t see how asking bigger questions about the themes or overall feel of the movie are going to be anything other than a pure gamble. The test audience isn’t necessarily going to understand what the creatives were aiming for, and especially if you have an executive come and ask questions that almost certainly don’t match up with what the creatives were aiming for, you’re going to have a bad time.
I have to imagine the star makes a big difference there. The Rock is a megastar. Leslie Grace has one film credit to her name. Maybe she’ll be the next Charlize Theron, but she’s not there yet.
Take this with a massive grain of salt, but I saw a report that said Zaslav got into a shouting match with other board members, as they wanted to shelve Flash indefinitely while Zaslav wants it to proceed as scheduled. He also reportedly is lukewarm about Aquaman 2 and doesn’t think it will do well in the box office.
extremely funny considering aquaman is like the only dceu property that was a genuine smash hit.
Just genuinely gonna stand by this comment and pretend Wonder Woman was what?
Zaslav seems like a nightmare, but the testing info that has been leaked is that Flash is testing very well. Given Zaslav seems to be an analytics robot with no understanding of human factors involved, I can see why he wants to go forward with the Flash and is blind to the moral and ethical issues there.That said “scheduled” is still almost a year out. I’ll believe it comes out when I see it.
He’s right to trust it: Testing is why Hollywood only releases massive hit movies and television shows nowadays.
Zaslav looks like a guy who tells everyone he owns a boat. Whether or fuckin’ not him owning a boat is germane to whatever situation they’re in.
Warner Brothers listened to the fans, where did that end them up? With a PG 1st Suicide Squad. The Flash will be great. Why would anyone cancel it? 200+ million downloads the drain and the DCEU would have no place to go.
They’ll cancel it because Ezra Miller is having some sort of mental health crisis which will become the entire story when the movie is released and that’s just assuming that they don’t do anything worse between now and June. If they say they can’t release it due to Miller they can write it off or get an insurance settlement.It’s going to be hard to attract none fans to the film when the headline is “The Flash starring disgraced actor Ezra Miller who is accused of kidnapping and grooming an 18 year old and of kidnapping and hiding a mother and her three children releases today.” It will be impossible to do press. The DCEU has no where to go at this point without a reboot.
uh, last i checked the R rated The Suicide Squad wasn’t exactly a box office smash. Nor was R-rated Birds of Prey. DC keeps chasing that Deadpool audience and not finding it – probably Peacemaker was about closest they’ve come.
The R-rated Suicide Squad wasn’t done any favors by a Covid surge and premiering on HBOMax day of. However, it was way better received and spun off Peacemaker.
yes, i agree with that. A bit too gory for my tastes (that’s just me) but overall a huge improvement over the 1st suicide squad and one of the better dceu entries. I just don’t think it was the success WB was hoping for, although it did lead to the peacemaker series, which at the time they liked, who knows where S2 will end up with the new management
…I saw a report that said Zaslav got into a shouting match with other board members…This made me happy.
Riiiiight….you must’ve been the fly on the wall. Quit starting stuff where there is none.
Gotta love how Batgirl becomes less of a completed film the more information comes out about it. Meanwhile, Snyder got like 3/4th Batgirl’s budget to produce the unchecked ego cut, turning a ‘bad’ film into a bloated but still bad film. All with The Flash starring a guy who is bad press incarnate and honestly had some serious issues before the movie started filming.
I do hope the tested version of Batgirl leaks somehow though. I also hope it turns out to be better than everyone expected to at least give the people who created it some cred.
Now I’m also wondering if Joker 2 is just going to be A Star is Born with DC paint the same way Joker 1 was a mashup of Scorsece films with DC paint.
Pretty much everyone’s predicting Harley is going to be Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.
So her last shot will show her petrified after the protagonist does something horrific ostensibly on her behalf but over her vehement objections?
Whoa that just blew my mind a little.
i think he got more than 4/4ths of batgirl’s budget. didn’t he get 75 million and batgirl was only 70?
Last I heard, Batgirl was 90mil but I couldn’t really find anything official.
yeah its hard to tell if that 90 is what it could have added up to if they did the additional shooting or if it ballooned from 70 to 90 behind the scenes. either way, i doubt the 75 they said they added to justice league was correct either. iirc there was an exec who was like ‘i WISH it was only 75′ in an interview.
It was 70 or 75 million originally. The 90 million figure includes additional costs incurred due to covid-related delays.
If you are calling Zack Snyders Justice League a bad film…no one should ever pay attention to any opinion you ever have again.
Usually you smooth stuff over with the talent *first.* That’s one of the weirdest missteps of this whole thing. Movies get shelved all the time, but most execs want to take care of their talent. The fact that Walter Hamada came close to quitting because he wasn’t told speaks volumes to how the people side of this was handled.It will be hard to attract talent if this is how they are treated.
Zaslav comes from reality shows; he doesn’t understand how to deal with actual talent.
Or, possibly, actual reality.
Well…it’s good Leslie isn’t actually actual talent then.
I wasn’t saying “nobody on reality shows is talented” in a subjective sense of quality; I was saying “nobody on reality shows is talent”, in the objective industry sense of the word. Leslie Grace is a professional actress; she is “talent”, regardless of whether or not she’s any good at it.
They should just write her a $90M check, and DOUBLE their tax writeoff.The talent’s happy, and I just made them tens of millions of dollars!
It’s a Win Win! They should make me CEO!
You’ve already proven more competent than Zaslav.
I love how the Variety article has unnamed WB execs seeking to “mend fences” with Leslie Grace, while in the same article those same execs are insisting the Joker sequel “is more like A Star Is Born than In the Heights”… a quote that throws a whole lot of shade on Grace’s other movie for WB. Nice way to show an actress that you appreciate her and that she should work with you again.
WB really looked at people slowly turning on the MCU a little bit and said “Trying to elbow in on OUR monopoly of pissed off fans? I think the FUCK not! Set it all on gire!!!”
She should tell them to F off.
Just bring her back as a Latin American DC Superhero like Black Orchid and the problems solved . Most people support diversity its just race swapping characters that causes all the controversy and it just adds to the widening social and political divide in the USA . Its so dangerous to keep doing this kind of thing because it is a factor in pushing an ever growing number of people into more radical and extreme views .
99% of the time, when new management comes in, they shelve everything their predecessor did because it is all one gigantic dick-swinging contest. Only their stuff can be successful, not the asshole who was in this chair before. But this is taking it to a whole ‘nother level, almost as if Zaslav has a grudge to settle against the entire concept of scripted movies and tv shows. He owns Warner Brothers because they couldn’t do fiction well enough to save themselves, and now he shall bring the concept of fiction to its very knees! Everyone must be building a house, matchmaking with millionaires, or determining whether something is cake! Your new God is here!
“Joker: Folie à Deux starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga”Fucking cringe
a “10-week director’s cut” that tested so low I mean, did they at least give them toilet breaks?