UPDATE: Batgirl is now named and being used in the attempt to stop the Paramount-WBD merger. Full report here.
Four years after Warner Bros. Discovery buried a finished $90 million movie for a tax break, one of its stars just blew a hole in the official story.
J.K. Simmons, who played Commissioner Gordon in the shelved Batgirl film, says the test screening that supposedly doomed the movie never actually produced a bad score, which is not how DC Studios boss Peter Safran has been telling it.
Simmons made the comments on the Happy Sad Confused podcast while out promoting The Westies, his new MGM+ gangster drama premiering Sunday.
Keep that show in mind, because his co-lead happens to be Tom Brittney, the actor connected to James Gunn’s DCU Batman. More on that below.
When host Josh Horowitz brought up the film, Simmons first cracked, “That big hit Batgirl,” before getting into it.
“It’s bizarre. Apparently, one test audience saw it, and you know, it wasn’t like it was a bad score from the test audience,” he said. “It was a whatever business decision obviously, and then, Justice League, which was a very small part, had its own drama attached to it. But then Zack’s cut… the director’s cut came out, which the DC fans really love.”
Simmons, who says he never even saw a cut of the finished film, continued: “When Batgirl came along with Adil and Bilall, it was an exciting prospect to be part of the origin story of Batgirl. For those who don’t know, Commissioner Gordon’s daughter. Maybe we’ll never know… We really had a good time making it and thought it was going to be a fun superhero movie. Oh well.”
‘Not releasable’ meets ‘not a bad score’
Rewind to August 2022, when the finished movie starring Leslie Grace, Brendan Fraser, and Michael Keaton‘s returning Batman got yanked from the HBO Max schedule.
The narrative pushed at the time was that Batgirl tested disastrously, David Zaslav wrote it off for taxes, and DC Studios co-boss Peter Safran later doubled down, telling reporters “that film was not releasable” and praising the shelving as a “bold and courageous decision.”
Simmons is now on record, from inside the production, saying the number was never the problem.
And that should sound familiar, because our insiders said the same machinery ran in reverse on Supergirl, which tested like Batgirl did yet got released anyway and cost WBD somewhere in the neighborhood of $244 million.
Follow the logic: DC shelved the movie with the okay score and released the one that tested badly. The decisions were never really about the scores.
The Christina Hodson of it all
Here is where it gets better. Batgirl was written by Christina Hodson. So was Birds of Prey. So was The Flash. That is one shelved movie, one flop, and one of the biggest box office bombs in superhero history, all from the same keyboard.
And in January, THR confirmed that Hodson is writing The Brave and the Bold, Gunn’s DCU Batman and Damian Wayne movie. Gunn spent years refusing to name the writer, claiming he wanted to spare them public pressure. Scooper Jeff Sneider, who broke the news, said the secrecy was about her DC track record. You think?
The Brave and the Bold still has no cast, no release date, and no clear runway, with Matt Reeves reportedly pushing back on Gunn using Batman at all.
Simmons’ new co-star is the rumored DCU Batman
Which brings us back to The Westies. The MGM+ series premieres this Sunday, July 12, with Simmons as Hell’s Kitchen crime boss Eamon Sweeney and Tom Brittney as his protégé, Jimmy Roarke.
Brittney is the name attached to Gunn’s DCU Batman plans, and when he got asked about it on live TV, his answer was anything but a denial.
File it under rumor for now, as DC Studios has never commented. Still, picture it: the DCEU’s Commissioner Gordon spent last summer trading scenes with the guy who might be the DCU’s Bruce Wayne. Gotham is a small town.
Never has a shelf life
As for Batgirl itself, the tax write-off means WBD can’t simply flip a switch and monetize the film.
But Coyote vs. Acme was supposed to be just as dead, and it found a distributor in Ketchup Entertainment.
With the Paramount takeover of WBD moving toward the finish line and Gunn’s DC future looking shakier by the week, every “never” at this studio now comes with an asterisk.
“Maybe we’ll never know,” Simmons says. At Warner Bros. Discovery, never has a shelf life.
