90 million dollars was the cost of the Batgirl movie Warner Bros made, but cancelled in post production.
How this happened?
Warner Bros was founded nearly 100 years ago, on April 4th, 1923.
Warner Bros in 1990 merged with Time Inc in 1990, combining the media division of Warner Bros, with the telecoms brand of Time Inc.
Time Warner sold to AT&T in 2018 for 85 billion dollars, where only four years later, they decided they wanted the telecoms/cable business, but not to be involved with Warner Bros and content production.
The result was AT&T merged Warner Bros into Discovery, with a 43 billion dollar deal to setup a new company, giving AT&T shareholders some skin into that.
Doing that, there’s now a new CEO and desire to make the Warner Bros brand financially more sound.
One of the biggest assets Warner Bros owns in DC Comics, buying it in 1969.
Which Warner’s biggest rival is Disney, that bought Marvel in 2009 for 4 billion and since in the last 13 years has made more money on movies than the entire history of Warner in DC over a period of 50 years, by a multiple.
Enter Batgirl
Batgirl was intended on being a HBO Max movie, which would tie into the DCEU.
Quick explanation on the DCEU, it’s the rival to Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, where Henry Cavill’s Superman, Ben Affleck’s Batman and other movies are all in that canon. It doesn’t include the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, the Robert Pattinson Batman or Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker. All things which were much more profitable.
The DCEU has had mixed success, where Batman vs Superman, Justice League, Suicide Squad, Harley Quinn and most of the movies they’ve done fell below projections and even lost money.
Batgirl was a weird idea.
They brought back JK Simmons to play Commissioner Gordon, but also brought back Micheal Keaton to be Batman again.
Which was a weird thing for fans, because the DCEU in an attempt to pivot is doing some storyline where now Ben Affleck is likely out as Batman and Micheal Keaton is even, even though JK Simmons who wasn’t Gordon in the Keaton films is back, despite being Gordon in the Affleck movies.
It really didn’t make much sense and I don’t think it’d make sense to any casual fan.
The Batgirl movie was also sort of a mess, where it has been in development hell for over a decade.
Originally Avengers director/Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon was supposed to direct, but lost the gig after a variety of scandals.
They brought it back as an HBO Max original, invested 90 million into it, but randomly decided to cancel the movie.
Everyone on the team said it was 95% finished, but Warner would rather mark it as a loss, versus give it a proper release.
Why did they do this?
Initially the reports were it got bad early reception in focus groups and it was going to take reshoots/more editing to fix.
Reshoots to fix a movie have kind of a mixed history.
One example is Solo, where Disney didn’t like the direction of the Star Wars spinoff, so they fired the directors, hired Ron Howard to direct, got rid of 80% of the original footage and put in an additional 100 million to make it happen.
It ended up the most expensive Star Wars movie ever, costing 275 million dollars, made only 393 million in theaters and lost over 100 million after marketing/theater cuts.
The loss wouldn’t have been as bad if they didn’t pump literal millions to save something which didn’t have much market interest.
That’s a flop, but there’s a flip side to this and that’s Sonic the Hedgehog.
Sonic had a live action movie few were looking forward to and released a trailer, which was universally panned by fans.
Paramount spent 5 million to redesign Sonic and it was reported another 5-10 million for minor reshoots/edits.
The movie made 320 million in theaters on a budget of 90 million, which was enough to make a profit.
This makes a case that reshoots can work, but also can fail.
What’s interesting though is new leaks show Batgirl actually had an okay reception from focus groups.
This makes me believe there’s another reason this happened and the answer is taxes.
Batgirl not being released can be marked as a failure and it’d allow Warner to write it as a loss for a deduction on corporate taxes.
But that doesn’t mean it can never come out.
Warner could after a fairly short period of time be able to sell Batgirl to another studio or even itself in a liquidity event on failed projects.
They could sell it to another studio or even just give it away, which would let them invest and finish the post production.
If that studio is just a movie producer and not a streamer/distributor, they’d need someone to buy it from them and Warner could just buy the movie back, making it an HBO Max original.
An example of this is fast food franchises, where the number one group that buys individual fast food franchises that go bankrupt is the parent company, who try to fix and later sell to a new franchisee.
This makes me think Batgirl will come out in 3+ years, where it’s not really seen as a canon part of the DCEU and Warner just goes “Hey, we made this a while back and decided to put it on HBO Max to celebrate Christmas 2027!”.
Which sounds bizarre, but this kind of stuff is common in media.
Take the Sixth Sense.
A VP at Disney bought the screenplay without consulting his higher ups, got fired and Disney didn’t see it fitting their brand.
They actually wrote it as a loss, but gave the rights to Spyglass Entertainment and got a 12% royalty, where they profited.
Something like that will happen with Batgirl.