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Volume 702
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Monday, February 13th, 2023
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Page 1 of 4
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This is variety.com
When "Batgirl" completed its seven-month production in Scotland, star Leslie Grace received a wrap gift from Brendan Fraser, who played her nemesis, Firefly, in the DC movie - a gold necklace that included
two charms, a little bell and a pair of dice.
"The card said a lot of really sweet things, but he basically said, I give you this necklace because in this business you gotta have a little luck. So ring your bell and never stop," Grace says. "It was
just like, Whoa. And after all this, it's had so much meaning."
"All this" is the August bombshell that Warner Bros. Discovery had decided to kill the film, co-directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. After the first
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disappointing test screenings, WBD executives chose to take a tax write-off instead of trying to complete work on the film, which had cost the debt-ridden studio $90 million, and would have cost many more
millions to finish.
Grace says she had no idea the movie, originally set to stream on HBO Max, was shelved, until it was first reported by the New York Post.
"I found out like the rest of you," she says. "And then my phone just started blowing up."
Like Grace, Fraser says he was blindsided by the news. "I thought I was getting punked, but it checked out," he says of reading the initial stories. "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.
Fraser immediately called Grace. "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,"
he says. "That makes me
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