Brendan Fraser addressed Warner Bros. Discovery’s decision to shelve the completed Batgirl movie, in which he plays Firefly. In a new interview, he called out the studio’s decision in 2022 to cancel the film’s release, discussing how it impacts a “generation of girls” and how movies are being detrimentally “commodified” by Hollywood.
“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,’” he said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
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The shelved film stars Afro-Dominican actress Leslie Grace in the titular role and she would have represented the first Batgirl to headline her own film. The cast also included Ivory Aquino as the first openly transgender character in a DC Comics movie (Aquino is also transgender).
Fraser also addressed how he views Hollywood’s approach to films in the current climate. “The product — I’m sorry, ‘content’ — is being commodified,’ he told AP, “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.”
Shot in Scotland, the Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah-directed Batgirl was shelved in August 2022, when Warner Bros. Discovery decided to kill releasing the completed film. “A whole movie,” Fraser said. “I mean, there were four floors of production in Glasgow. I was sneaking into the art department just to geek out.”
The cast was apparently not given warning about its demise, and were “blindsided” when the news was announced, sources told Rolling Stone at the time. As for why it was nixed, one source said that test audiences thought it was like “a bad episode of TV,” and another said “it’s definitely not theatrical.”
Fraser, who took home the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in 2022’s The Whale, is starring in Rental Family, which opened in theaters this weekend. In it, he plays a struggling American actor living in Tokyo, who takes on a job for the Japanese Rental Family Agency, where he plays out roles in the lives of Japanese families.
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