Warner Bros. made headlines earlier this month for the shelves Bat girl, her film that was supposed to bring Barbara Gordon / Batgirl (Leslie Grace) into the modern DC cinematic universe. The move surprised fans, especially since the project had already wrapped principal photography and was in the midst of post-production. The film’s directors, Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi, have spoken out on social media about the decision and how they were personally banned from access Bat girl footage as soon as the cancellation was made public. In a recent video posted to their Instagram accounts, Fallah and El Arbi shed more light on the circumstances surrounding the cancellation, including their efforts to try and record some of the footage on their phones as backup.
“I was in Tetouan visiting the grave of my grandparents,” Falah explained. “As I was leaving, I picked up my phone and saw several messages. They called me and said “Bat girl Done.'”
“I was in Tangier, in a hotel, on my honeymoon with my wife,” echoed El Arbi. “Suddenly, I got a phone call. Meanwhile, I was getting all these messages and they told me that they were going to kill the movie. When I heard that, I was shocked, because I didn’t even realize that was a possibility. It was like we were making movie history there. I immediately called our editor Martin Walsh and I said “Yeah, you need to back up this sh-t. Make backups! Copy the movie!””
“Then Adil called me and said ‘Put it on the phone!'” Fallah continued. “I went to the server and everything was blocked.”
“I apologize, this is not the right thing to do,” El Arbi admitted. “But I was panicking, you know. It’s not good to hack. It was just, ‘What are you doing?’ To see that the film was gone and we didn’t have access to the footage or we couldn’t watch it again ourselves, it was very hard.”
The duo also provided some insight into the state of the film itself, with the project coming together enough to be present at recent “funeral screenings” for the cast and crew, but still much to be done before it’s truly complete.
“The movie wasn’t even made,” El Arbi revealed. “There was still a long way to go. There was a lot of work to be done… We were just starting to get somewhere with post-production.”
“There were no VFX, there were missing scenes,” Fallah added. “We missed the replays.”
Bat girl directed by Fallah and Adil El Arbi, written by Christina Hodson. The film would star Leslie Grace as Barbara Gordon / Batgirl, with JK Simmons reprising his role as Commissioner James Gordon and Michael Keaton reprising his role as Bruce Wayne / Batman. The cast also included Brendan Fraser as Firefly, Ivory Aquino as Alysia Yeoh, and Jacob Scipio, Rebecca Front, Corey Johnson, and Ethan Kai in currently unknown roles.
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