How much Batgirl does Batgirl need were Batgirl to bat, girl? More than a Snyder Cut, that’s for sure. On August 2, it was reported that the then-upcoming film was going to be shelved by Warner Bros. in favor of no Batgirl. However, there was little understanding of how much work the film actually needed. When the news broke, it was reported by the New York Post that the film was cut in part due to poor test screenings, but that did not give a clear picture of how much of the film was actually completed. Turns out? It was very much not done. Batgirl “cannot be released in its current state,†said Adil El Arbi, one of the film’s directors, to Skript, a French YouTube channel covering entertainment, according to a translation by The Hollywood Reporter. “There’s no VFX, we still had to shoot some scenes,†he said. So if Warner Bros. “wanted us to release the Batgirl movie, they would need to give us the means to do it, to finish it properly with our vision.â€
Warner Bros. has made headlines this month for its efforts to reduce the content from HBO Max under the new leadership of David Zaslav, who now seems like a DC supervillain. Not helping his case to be a good guy is that the directors of the film no longer have access to any of their footage, including scenes with Michael Keaton, who was set to reprise his role as Batman. Bilall Fallah, the film’s other director, said that when the shelving occurred, “Adil called me and said, ‘Go ahead shoot some things on your cell phone.’ I went on the server and everything was blocked.†“We were like, fucking shit,†El Arbi added. “All the scenes with Batman in them! Shit!†If supervillain Zaslav cared about true art, he’d release a Keaton Kut.