Directors Bilall Fallah And Adil El Arbi Tried To Illegally Save Footage From The Canceled ‘Batgirl’ Film Only To Find It Was All Deleted
It appears there won’t be a Snyder Cut — or make that a Fallah/El Arbi Cut — of Batgirl as all the footage has been deleted; even the scenes featuring Michael Keaton.
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Co-director Bilall Fallah revealed this in an interview with the French outlet Skript which had to be translated and credit goes to The Direct for the transcription.
Fallah shared that “everything was gone” when he went on the server with his smartphone. “No, we have nothing. Adil called and told me, ‘Go ahead! Shoot everything on your phone!'” he said.
“I went on the server… Everything was gone. We were [like]… ‘F—king s—t!’… We did not [even] keep [the scenes] with Batman in it,” Fallah added.
According to a previous report, there wasn’t much featuring Batman to begin with — nevertheless, the duo may have been taking a cue from Zack Snyder who had all the unfinished footage for his version of Justice League on a laptop.
That footage and laptop may have been the property of Warner Bros. and the Man of Steel director may have absconded with it all, but his cut was eventually completed and released.
Whatever the circumstances and exceptions at the time, Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi aren’t in the same boat due to the canceling of their film as a tax write-off. “Warner Bros. told us the cancellation was a strategic change, a shifting in management so they could save some bucks,” they explained.
Taking the loss and yanking the picture as Warner Discovery CEO David Zaslav did comes with conditions. One is Batgirl cannot be monetized and another is it can never be exhibited publicly. Hence, the studio cracked down pre-emptively on any attempts to save the raw footage.
There were “funeral screenings” held for the cast and crew of what El Arbi and Fallah had cut together, but the film was in no way finished. Neither was the VFX work.
“We were right in the middle of editing. There was a lot of work to get done, so it was not like the movie was finished!” said Fallah.
When production was canceled, the two had mixed emotions. Mostly, they were shocked and ready “to break stuff, cry…Even laugh!” However, they were moved and allayed by the support fans and others in the industry showed them.
“But seeing all this support on the Internet, like Twitter,” Fallah said, “and even big directors like Edgar Wright and James Gunn sent us supportive messages. It was very heartwarming.”
El Arbi added they made Batgirl “for the audience. Not us. We just hope that one day, the movie can be released.”
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