A behind-the-scenes look at the now-canceled Batgirl movie reveals another look at The Whale star Brendan Fraser as the DC supervillain, Firefly. Revealed courtesy of Batgirl lead Leslie Grace, who took to Instagram to share a montage of her 2022 experience, there are several glimpses at the Batgirl solo outing, with one clip revealing Grace choking out Fraser’s bad guy. You can check out, and scour the montage for slices of footage from Batgirl, below.
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Development on a Batgirl adventure first began way back in 2017 with The Avengers director Joss Whedon on board to helm the project. While this initial idea fell through, Batgirl found itself some new filmmakers in the form of Bad Boys for Life directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, who had been working hard on bringing the comic book movie to life before it was suddenly canceled back in August last year.
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MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
In the Heights star Leslie Grace had already suited up as the lead, with the actress playing Barbara Gordon aka Batgirl alongside Jacob Scipio, Ivory Aquino, Rebecca Front, Corey Johnson, and Ethan Kai, with J. K. Simmons as James Gordon, and Michael Keaton as an aged Bruce Wayne AKA Batman. The main villain of Batgirl would have been Brendan Fraser as Ted Carson aka Firefly, a low-level thief who so happens to be a sociopathic pyromaniac with an obsessive love for starting fires. Seeing Fraser join the DC cinematic universe was a source of real excitement for fans, and no doubt this latest backstage look at Batgirl will renew the calls for the movie to be released…somehow.
Brendan Fraser Has Called the Cancelation of Batgirl ‘Tragic’
Warner Bros. Pictures
Brendan Fraser himself, who is currently undergoing a resurgence in his career, has commented on the unceremonious cancelation of the Batgirl movie, calling the move by President and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery David Sazlav “tragic.”
“It’s tragic. It doesn’t engender trust among filmmakers and the studio,” Fraser said of the decision. “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.”
While certain details of Batgirl remain under wraps, reports have claimed that the movie would have told the origin of the character amid small, personal, street-level stakes. Reasons for the decision to scrap Batgirl have been somewhat vague, with both Batgirl’s $90 million budget determined to be more valuable as a tax write-off and the project going against the new mandate for “big theatrical event films” being posited by insiders. Further reports have since offered some insight into the cancelation, stating that “studio insiders insist the decision was not driven by the quality of the film or the commitment of the filmmakers, but by the desire for the studio’s slate of DC features to be at a blockbuster scale.”
Sadly, these snippets from behind-the-scenes are likely to be all we ever see of the Batgirl movie.
