The film industry press is buzzing this week from the news that Warner Brothers has decided to completely shelve its upcoming HBO Max streaming release of DC franchise outing Batgirl. That’s in spite of the studio having greenlit the film for a budget of $80m. It was already in post-production and its star, Leslie Grace, was already making noise in interviews about how excited she was for its release.
Warners had committed the film to streaming on its 76.8-million subscriber platform HBO Max from the get-go, deciding that it would be spectacular enough for a small screen offering but not quite at the levels needed for a theatrical release.
The film would have provided the DC comics franchise — still struggling to keep up with Disney’s record-smashing Marvel Comics Universe — an opportunity for a number of significant representative firsts. It was hailed as the first DC film to feature a Latina lead; the first in the franchise to feature a transgender actress — Ivory Aquino — in a supporting role and the first to be directed by Muslim brothers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (Bad Boys for Life). And there was plenty of online excitement about the fact that Michael Keaton would be donning the bat suit for the first time in 30 years since he played the dark knight in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns.
Even though the budget had reportedly increased to $90m thanks to the expenses incurred by shooting under Covid protocols, the studio still seemed set to honour its original promise of a streaming release until things at parent company Warner Bros Discovery took a more austerity-measured turn in recent months. It seems the idea that you can make a streaming film for the same budget as a mid-level theatrical film isn’t flying with CEO David Zaslav, who is instituting a wide-ranging cost-cutting operation of which Batgirl is the latest victim.
The idea that you can make a streaming film for the same budget as a mid-level theatrical film isn’t flying with the company’s CEO
Practically from a business point of view, but very cynically from a producer of cultural capital perspective, Zaslav and his number crunchers have calculated that they will lose less on Batgirl by shelving the film and taking a tax write-off than they would if they were to go ahead with the HBO Max release. Their decision was reportedly made easier by the results of early test screenings of the film, which averaged in the low 60s. Those are not the worst figures in the company’s history if you consider that the 2017 If reboot scored similarly and went on to make $700.3m at the global box office but they may be too risky for a film that needs to make its profits entirely without any theatrical release assistance.
The larger implications of this decision are potentially worrying. If one of the biggest entertainment companies in the world doesn’t believe that a comics superhero franchise film like Batgirl can make its money back and that, as some sources told The Hollywood Reporter recently, the budgets for streaming releases should sit in the more modest — but still not too shabby — budget bracket of $40m to $50m, then what kind of signal will that send to other platforms that are spending huge amounts of money on streaming first releases?
Netflix has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on big-spectacle, big-star action films like Red Notice and the recent The Gray Man to deliver on promises that home-viewers will be happy to enjoy their big screen kicks on their small screens. Disney has likewise expanded its hugely popular Star Wars and MCU franchises across its platforms, mixing releases successfully between streaming, series and big screen blockbusters.
Straight to streaming is certainly not the same as “straight to video” was back in the 1980s and ’90s or the even earlier B- and drive-in movie fare, in terms of budgets and star power. The high vs low popular culture divisions between television and film have steadily been erased during the era of peak TV with tentpole stars and Oscar winners flocking to the streaming universe.
Warners’ cautious cost-cutting measures may cost the company in the short term because it seems that planned releases for its DC Franchise theatrical titles may also change. These include the planned December release of Shazam! Fury of the Gods and the scheduled March 2023 release of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. That leaves the rest of the year open for the MCU to clean up and will mean that any momentum DC enjoyed from its release earlier this year of The Batman will be lost.
There are no easy answers and never have been as to how to guarantee profits in the movie business but one thing most film historians and experienced executives will probably tell you is that it’s not an industry in which you can succeed if you’re completely risk averse. That’s either a lesson that Warner’s Batgirl decision will overturn or one that it will learn at some cost to its shareholders and to much smug “I told you sos” from its competitors in the coming months.
While Warners may have managed to cut its losses on this one, it may also suffer trust issues from anyone it asks to get involved on a future straight-to-streaming release, and its competitors may decide that spending big screen money on small screen releases isn’t the way of the future.
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