Warner Bros. bringing the hammer down on Batgirl in August 2022 sent shockwaves through the movie industry. It’s rare for any project deep into post-production to be permanently shelved, let alone a superhero blockbuster set in Gotham City featuring Michael Keaton as Batman.
Even worse, we’ll probably never see it as Batgirl was treated as a tax write-off for the studio. That means it legally cannot profit from it, so the almost-complete film will languish on a hard drive in the dusty company vault that we imagine looking a bit like the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
It’s a tragedy for all involved, but now we’re getting an idea of how much work went into the film’s action sequences, and what we might have seen. John Wick Chapter 4 stunt coordinator Scott Rogers also worked on Batgirl, and in an interview with Screen Rant, revealed a crazy action sequence involving Brendan Fraser’s Firefly:
“The thing that drew me to that movie in the first place was that there’s no superheroes. It’s a superhero movie with nobody with superpowers, so it was very grounded. It fit 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.”
With Fraser now the proud owner of a Best Actor Oscar courtesy of his performance in The Whale, we have to believe that at least some at Warner Bros. are regretting the decision to can Batgirl. After all, there’s renewed interest in the actor playing the villain, the fan response to Keaton’s Batman in The Flash trailer was off the charts, and it can’t be any worse than the terrible Shazam! Fury of the Gods.
Maybe one day Warner Bros. will release Batgirl from cinematic limbo so we can see for ourselves what it’s like. Until then, it’s gone down in history as a bizarre footnote in superhero cinema, with fans understandably wondering what if…