The
Batgirl
movie is finished, it has cost 90 million dollars (about 88 million euros), but it will not be released.
The Warner Brothers company announced on Tuesday that the film, whose filming concluded months ago and was already in the process of test screenings, will not be released either through the HBO Max platform, as intended for this year, or in the movie theaters.
Fans of DC comics are therefore left without the film adaptation of their heroine.
And the rest of the public wonders, surprised, why a company would give up commercially exploiting a work that is already finished and has cost so much.
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The film, starring Leslie Grace in the role of the heroine, featured the return of Michael Keaton as Batman, a role he was reprising for the first time since 1992. According to the American weekly
Variety
, which consulted various sources, the reason behind of the cancellation has to do with Warner's change in strategy, which no longer intends to focus almost all its efforts on the consolidation of HBO Max.
Because of this,
Batgirl
is no longer “neither big enough to be worthy of a theatrical release, nor small enough to have a financially valid reason to come out in an
increasingly aggressive
streaming environment.”
However, the same medium points to another issue: tax savings.
Different sources have assured that not releasing the film guarantees the entity a tax deduction for the income initially planned and now lost, which from within the organization is perceived as "the most financially sound way to recover the costs" of production. .
A company spokesperson confirmed to
The Hollywood Reporter
that the cancellation "reflects management's change in strategy regarding the DC universe and HBO Max."
The leadership of Warner Media, currently merged with Discovery, has also changed, since this spring it has David Zalslav as CEO.
The new boss does not share the strategy of his predecessors, Jason Kilar and Ann Sarnoff, focused above all on the launch of his
streaming
platform , to the point of releasing all his 2021 productions online and in theaters at the same time, a decision that sparked protests from both the theaters and the creative teams of several blockbusters.
Zaslav, then, has returned to the traditional early release in theaters.
But the company believes that, in the case of
Batgirl,
this would mean spending many more millions of dollars and that the cost is not worth the potential opportunity.
In addition to
Batgirl
, the production company has canceled
Scoob!: Holiday Hunt
, a film about the popular dog who solves mysteries with his human friends (and a sequel to 2020's
Scooby!
), whose budget was 40 million dollars.
Film adaptations of DC comics stories and characters have been a series of ups and downs for Warner in recent years.
Although there are deliveries like
Joker
(2019) and the recent
The Batman
(2022) that have been well received at the box office and by critics, his project of creating a superhero cinematic universe that could compete with the one developed by Marvel Studios has never really taken off.
One of the biggest bets in this regard was
Zack Snyder's Justice League
(2021), an extended and retouched version of the film that Snyder was initially unable to complete due to a personal tragedy that forced him to hand over the reins to Joss Whedon. (director of the first two
Avengers
adventures
).
The so-called
Snyder Cut
,
Highly demanded by fans of DC and the filmmaker
,
it had its premiere on HBO Max
.