Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, who first made a mark with the explosive 2020 smash hit “Bad Boys for Life,” are finally ready to talk about that cancelled “Batgirl” film. Their $90 million project was unceremoniously pulled, a victim of CEO David Zaslav‘s aggressive restructuring of Warner Bros. Discovery.
“Batgirl” starred Leslie Grace as Barbara Gordon, Brendan Fraser, J.K. Simmons, and the return of Michael Keaton as Batman. It’s now a part of movie history. Only a handful of insiders got to see it. The almost completely finished movie was canned at the last possible second.
“You’ve got to imagine, we’re two fanboys, and for one second we were in the Batman universe, following in the footsteps of Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan, and then it was just like we woke up and it was a dream,” Arbi told THR.
Fallah said after the shelving, the pair received an unbelievable amount of support, including personal messages from James Gunn and Edgar Wright, studio execs from Paramount and Sony, and even Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige. “There was so much support from people in the industry, it felt like all the artists were supporting us, and that’s a great feeling, because you feel like you’re not alone.”
Arbi and Fallah couldn’t attend the posthumous screening of the film held on the WB lot because they were in Belgium at the time, but they would be happy to work with the studio again.
“Yeah, we’d still work with them,” Fallah said. “But on the condition that the movie comes out. I mean, if Warner says, ‘Do you want to do the next Batman or Superman?,’ of course we’ll say yes. Just so long as the movie comes out!”
They also hinted that that they would soon be meeting with Gunn now that he’s been installed as DC Studio’s co-CEO. “The meetings are in the books,” Arbi said, but clarified nothing official has happened yet.
In the meantime, the directors have been pleased to see that the noise around “Batgirl” added momentum to their latest feature. “Rebel,” which screened at Cannes, and is part of the Red Sea Film Festival lineup in Jeddah, is an action thriller about two Muslim Belgian brothers dealing with identity alongside ISIS radicalization and recruitment during the war in Syria.
The profile of “Rebel,” which is yet to secure a U.S. distributor (it’s being released in the U.K. by Signature in January, and has been picked up by Front Row in the Middle East), has undoubtedly been boosted by the “Batgirl” situation. Alongside a sequel to their 2018 Belgian crime thriller “Gangsta,” Arbi claims they may soon have the “green light for a big action movie in Hollywood, but we don’t want to jinx it.”
Given their track record, we can’t say we blame them.
