Batgirl directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah are explaining how they tried — and failed — to “pirate” their own canceled DC movie upon hearing the news that it was being scrapped while the pair was in Morocco for Arbi’s wedding.
In a video uploaded to Arbi’s Instagram account, the directing duo behind the lauded Bad Boys for Life recounted the excruciating story of when they first found out the news about the movie’s cancelation, including that Fallah was in Tetouan “visiting the grave” of his grandparents when he saw “a lot of messages” on his phone as he was leaving the cemetery.
“I got a call, and they said to me: Batgirl is done,” Billah said.
“I was in Tangiers, in my hotel, honeymooning with my wife. And all of a sudden, I got a phone call. Meanwhile, I was getting all of these messages. And they said that they’re going to kill the movie,” Arbi added.
Once the “shock” subsided, Arbi said he immediately called the editor for the film, Martin Walsh, and pleaded with him to “back up that s–t! […] copy the movie!”
After that, Fallah said Arbi called him and asked him to “shoot it on your phone.”
“I went on the server, and everything was blocked,” Fallah recounted.
Though Arbi acknowledged it was “not the right thing to do” and apologized in retrospect for trying to salvage the movie in such a roundabout and nonofficial way, he explained the attempt was the result of “panicking” and having “an emotional reaction” to the news of the movie’s cancelation.
“It’s not good to do piracy,” Arbi said. “To see that the movie was gone and that we didn’t have any access to the footage or weren’t able to see it for ourselves again, that was pretty harsh.”
In all fairness to the directors, the choice of a movie studio to scrap a near-complete film — especially for a major comic book movie franchise — is almost unprecedented.
A secret screening of Batgirl is reportedly set to take place on the lot of Warner Bros Discovery, after which it will apparently be destroyed, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Such a revelation led actor Ivory Aquino, who plays Alysia Yeoh in the movie, to plead with WBD CEO David Zaslav to reverse his decision to bury the movie in a heartfelt open letter she published on Twitter on Thursday.
Batgirl was previously slated for a release directly onto the streaming service HBO Max before it was shelved at the last minute following a regime change at the newly merged movie studio that combined the previously separate companies of Warner Bros. and Discovery into one entity. Unless we see another miracle, like the one we got with the long-fan-lobbied release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League in 2021, it doesn’t appear as if the general public will ever see the Leslie Grace-starring Batgirl. Then again, maybe all this headline-generating controversy is all of the marketing WBD needs to justify Batgirl‘s release, as Aquino has suggested.