Batgirl directors still hope film will be released–but they were denied access to their footage

Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah recall their reaction to having their DC movie canned near completion

By Mary Kate Carr | August 23, 2022 | 4:55pm

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Batgirl directors still hope film will be released–but they were denied access to their footage

Photo: Dominique Charriau

Although there’s since been much more carnage in the Warner Bros. Discovery merger, Batgirl remains the most prominent casualty. In a new interview with SKRIPT (conducted in French), directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah express their disbelief at the outcome and their regret over not saving any of the footage.

“[We] have nothing!” Fallah shares, revealing that after they got word the film was canned, “Adil called me and said, ‘Go ahead shoot some things on your mobile [phone]!’ I went on the server… everything was gone.” El Arbi adds, “We were like, ‘Fucking shit!’ All the scenes with Batman in them! Shit!”

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So for those at home hoping the directors would go rogue and leak a bootleg version–no such luck. And anyway, the film “cannot be released in its current state,” according to El Arbi. “There’s no VFX, we still had to shoot some scenes. So if one day they wanted us to release the Batgirl movie they’d have to give us the means to do it. To finish it properly with our vision.”

Fallah and El Arbi reiterate they were told the shelving was “a strategic change” rather than an issue of talent (though, would the WB Discovery execs really tell them any differently if quality was the problem?). That didn’t make the news go down any easier: “First, when I heard the news, I was shocked, I didn’t know how to react. I wanted to break stuff, cry, even laugh. I was like, ‘this is not happening,’” Fallah says. “Seeing all the support on Twitter, and even from big directors Edgar Wright and James Gunn, who sent us supportive messages, it was very warming!”

“After all we make movies for the audience, not for us,” El Arbi agrees. “We just hope that one day the movie will be released, for the cast and crew. We are a small family.” Fallah agrees, “We hope, Inshallah, it happens–Release Batgirl!”

It seems it would take a miracle for Batgirl to be released now; once WB Discovery takes a tax write-down for the shuttered production, it can’t be released in any form without a penalty for the company. Maybe someone else got some of the footage on their phone before the lock-out?