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The actors were just as surprised by the cancellation as fans.

In August of 2022, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that they had pulled the plug on their new Batgirl film, which had already wrapped production and was going through post-production. Apparently, the film played poorly with initial test audiences, prompting Warner Bros. to shelve it and take a tax write-off instead.

The stars of the film, Leslie Grace and Brendan Fraser, hadn’t heard of the cancellation until it appeared in the public news. “I found out like the rest of you,” Grace said in an interview with Variety. “And then my phone just started blowing up.”

“I thought I was getting punked, but it checked out,” Fraser added. “Then came hysterical laughter like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me?’ I know that the filmmakers and producers were expecting to hear from the studio about the film, and the anticipation was, ‘How do we broaden the movie out to take it from a streaming format to a theatrical release?’ But as we all know, it was the complete opposite. When we were expecting XYZ amount of support and money to expand scenes — to do pickup shots and those kinds of things — that was a gut punch. But then we learned that it was in the interest of writing down some debt? That part really stung.”

‘Batgirl’ Star Leslie Grace Rejects Studio’s Claim the Axed Film Was Unreleasable: The Cut I Saw Was ‘Incredible’ (EXCLUSIVE) https://t.co/MCbPd0NENq

— Variety (@Variety) February 13, 2023

“What I find most lamentable is that now a whole generation of little girls are going to have to wait longer to see a Batgirl and say, ‘Hey, she looks like me,’” Fraser continued. “That makes me sad. I know how good she was. And I know what this would mean to so many people.”