“I thought I was getting punked”: Leslie Grace reacts to the shelving of ‘Batgirl’ movie

Actress Leslie Grace is opening up about when she found out about Warner Bros.’ decision last year to shelve Batgirl, the film that would have had her starring as the titular hero and her alter ego, Barbara Gordon.

“I found out like the rest of you,” she tells Variety in her first at-length discussion of the situation. “And then my phone just started blowing up,” she adds.

“I thought I was getting punked, but it checked out,” she said, explaining she had to read the news. “Then came hysterical laughter like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me?’ I know that the filmmakers … were expecting to hear from the studio about … ‘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.”

She adds, “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.”

Warner Bros. Discovery said at the time that the film, which was initially bound for HBO Max, would be written off for tax reasons.

“That part really stung,” the actress says.

Recently, DC Films co-chair Peter Safran — whose tenure with James Gunn hadn’t started when Batgirl was shelved — defended the “bold and courageous” decision. He commented to the trade, “I saw the movie, and there are a lot of incredibly talented people in front of and behind the camera on that film. But that film was not releasable … That film was not releasable.”

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