Cancel Culture

Leslie Grace as Batgirl. Photo: Warner Bros

I’m not overly invested in the machinations of the various Marvel and DC cinematic universes. I have my favourites, sure, but do I care if each studio’s respective movies perfectly sync up to form a cohesive whole ten years from now? I do not. That’s partly why I liked Shazam! Fury of the Gods (you can read my Scotsman review here and listen to my Radio Scotland Afternoon Show review on BBC Sounds). The film may or may not mark the end of DC’s beleaguered first efforts to create a joined-up comic book movie world (who can tell at this point?), but until it shoe-horns in an end-credit stinger setting up a new team-up film unlikely to see the light of day, watching this (slightly) more modest, kid-friendly film feels like fun, not nerd homework.

It also made me wish Warner Bros hadn’t cancelled Batgirl last year. The much-discussed $90 million DC movie became a tax write-off on the ledger sheet of a company that didn’t want to spend another dime on post-production, leading Jimmy Kimmel to joke at the Oscars this past weekend that Batgirl’s now “the only superhero to be defeated by an accounting department.”

That’s a bummer for a project that was never intended as a gargantuan billion-grossing tentpole release (it was supposed to debut on HBO Max in the US) — more so because it sounded pretty cool. In the Heights’ break-out star Leslie Grace was playing Batgirl, Michael Keaton’s Batman was making a return, and this year’s newly crowned Oscar-winner Brendan Fraser was its chief villain, Firefly.

On promotional duties for The Whale earlier this year, Fraser called Batgirl’s cancellation “tragic”, praised its more stripped-down approach and described his joy at being part of a production that got to run fire engines around the streets of Glasgow at 3AM. I’ll be honest, the Glasgow connection (all the location work was done in the city) is the main reason I wanted to see it. Like a lot of people who live here, I loved being able to wander round its Gotham City Christmas sets and watch snippets of the movie being shot after dark every time I had to cycle home from screenings.

Batgirl’s Gotham City sets being readied in Glasgow. Photo: Alistair Harkness

Of course the film, dubbed “not releasable” by the DC brass, might not have been any good in the end and there’s certainly no shortage of blockbusters that have undergone expensive post-production triage sessions only to flatline on release (see — or rather don’t see — the new Adam Driver vehicle 65). But in pulling the trigger in such brutal, definitive fashion, all DC has really done is enhance the film’s mystique, far more so than if it had been allowed to slip out this past Christmas as planned.

The cancelled movie is, after all, still something of a rarity, though not a phenomenon alien to comic book movies. I don’t mean all those (sadly) never-realised superhero projects, like the Michelle Pfeiffer Catwoman spinoff, the Nic Cage-starring Superman Lives or Darren Aronofsky’s gnarly sounding Batman: Year One, all incidentally DC/Warner Bros properties. The cameras never rolled on any of those, so they don’t count as cancelled films, not like Batgirl, and not like that infamous Roger Corman Fantastic Four adaptation from the early 1990s.

That was a movie that was shot, edited and on the point of release when the cast found out it wasn’t to be. Some of those involved — including Stan Lee — claimed the film was really a cheap ploy by its producer to hold on to some valuable IP before his option expired; others — including Corman — insisted the film was made as a b-movie and was fully intended to be released as such. The truth lay somewhere in between: future Marvel Studios founder Avi Arad bought out the film and destroyed the negatives because he didn’t want the brand cheapened — sentiments echoed in some of the corporate chat around Batgirl’s demise.

As it happens, that Fantastic Four film can now be found easily on YouTube. Does it matter that it’s terrible? Not really. The big irony is that the three subsequent blockbuster versions were merely terrible and unloved on a grander scale. Something to bear in mind as DC scales up its entire movie slate.