While on the press tour for his film, Rental Family, Brendan Fraser had a few choice words to share about the DC Studios live-action Batgirl movie Warner Bros. was supposed to release but didn’t, scrapping the film as a tax write-off. Despite being years divorced from the fact, Fraser’s understandable hard feelings about the whole ordeal still ring true as something worth being tilted over.
Speaking with the Associated Press about both the state of Fraser’s career “Brenaissance” and the current state of Hollywood, the soon-to-be returning The Mummy actor is still feeling pretty raw about Batgirl getting shelved. Fraser was slated to co-star in the film alongside Leslie Grace’s Barbara Gordon as the pyromaniac villain, Firefly.
“A whole movie. I mean, there were four floors of production in Glasgow. I was sneaking into the art department just to geek out,” Fraser told AP. “The tragedy of that is that there’s a generation of little girls who don’t have a heroine to look up to and go, ‘She looks like me.’ I mean, Michael Keaton came back as Batman. The Batman!”
He continued: “The product—I’m sorry, ‘content’—is being commodified to the extent that it’s more valuable to burn it down and get the insurance on it than to give it a shot in the marketplace. I mean, with respect, we could blight itself.”
This, of course, isn’t the first time Fraser has sounded off on Batgirl getting bat-canned on a press tour for a different film. Namely, while doing the rounds for Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale (for which he won an Oscar in his grand return to cinema), Fraser didn’t mince words on how the whole situation didn’t engender trust between studios and filmmakers.
“It doesn’t engender trust among filmmakers and the studio,” Fraser told Variety, mirroring his sentiment today about the whole ordeal being “tragic.”
Hopefully all of the endless public shaming Warner Bros. has garnered over the years for fumbling not only a pitch for a Batman Beyond animated film in the stylings of Into The Spider-Verse (we’re still livid about that one) but also Batgirl—a film that is in effect finished and kept in a vault—will result in the same kind of bullying result that revived Coyote vs. Acme.
Till then, let us all take solace in the karma justice that Warner Bros. is in its “nobody wants me” era, what with no one wanting to buy it after all of its masterful gambits at making and not making some promising comic book movies before asking James Gunn to bail them out.
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