New, No-Nonsense CEO of Warner Bros Discovery Cancels $90 Million Superhero Movie For Being ‘Irredeemably’ Woke
Batgirl, an uber-woke, race-swap superhero movie in which the lead character has a trans best friend, has been shelved by David Zaslav, the new CEO of Warner Bros Discovery. First he deep-sixed CNN+, the offshoot of the progressive 24-hour news channel, and now he’s decided not to release the latest addition to the DC franchise, in spite of the fact that Warner Bros had spent upwards of $90 million on it and it was effectively finished. Zaslov is so underwhelmed by it, it isn’t even going to be released on HBO Max, the studio’s streaming service. Tom Leonard in the Daily Mail has the story.
It may even be the most expensive film ever made that will never see the light of day.
The film had got as far as test screenings and was being slated for release in cinemas and on the U.S. streaming service HBO Max by the end of this year.
However, the audience feedback was so awful that — in an almost unprecedented move — Warner Bros has decided the reputational damage of releasing such a dud would be even worse than wasting the tens of millions of dollars it has already spent on it.
“It just didn’t work,” said an insider. The decision is also a blow for Glasgow, which had stood in for Gotham City in the movie.
Given the low standard of so much of the content on Netflix, Amazon Prime and other streaming services, and the fact that superhero films have a fanatically loyal audience, it all represents a jaw-dropping failure.
But why was it cancelled so late in the day, and after so much time, money and resources had been spent on it?
Some have alleged the film may have been scrapped rather than released for tax reasons; Warner Bros can now claim Batgirl as a tax write-off — helping it recoup some of its costs elsewhere. However, that doesn’t account for why the film was so bad in the first place.
And here there are certainly strong clues to suggest that Batgirl was only the latest in a long and disastrous line of Hollywood films that have prioritised politically correct values over entertainment. As Robin might say, Holy Woke, Batman!
Fans will remember that in the original comics, Batgirl is the night-time alter ego of Barbara Gordon, the daughter of Gotham City’s red-headed police commissioner Jim Gordon.
The star of the film was a little-known Afro-Latina singer-actress named Leslie Grace. This alone was a big risk as 27-year-old Grace’s only previous major acting role was in the box-office flop In The Heights, a ‘musical drama’ made by woke hero Lin-Manuel Miranda, the man behind the musical Hamilton.
Hollywood icon Michael Keaton was reprising his role as Batman, while Commissioner Gordon — Batgirl’s father — was played by the actor J.K. Simmons, who starred in 2002’s Spider-Man.
The film was directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, young Moroccan-Belgians best known for the TV series Ms Marvel, about a Muslim Pakistani-American teenage girl who is bullied at school until she develops superpowers.
When Ms Marvel was released in June, it received a tsunami of abuse from comic book fans complaining about its unbearable wokeness.
(The series is made by Disney, so progressive nowadays that it applies racism warnings to the crows in Dumbo and offers a children’s show — called Baymax! — which features a scene in which a robot asks a transgender man what sort of sanitary product he should buy for a 12-year-old girl.)
Batgirl’s screenplay was by Christina Hodson, the British writer of ultra-feminist film Birds Of Prey, accused by one critic of “hating on men — all men . . . [and] dull to the point of numbing”.
Batgirl also featured a transgender character, Alysia Yeoh, Barbara Gordon’s flatmate, played by the trans actor Ivory Aquino.
The appearance, critics say, is of a film putting its ‘progressive’ values ahead of all other concerns.
And not for the first time. Superhero films — normally somewhere audiences might go to escape our era’s endless culture wars — have increasingly become major repositories of wokery.
In 2021, Marvel’s mega-budget movie Eternals — starring Angelina Jolie, Kit Harington and Richard Madden — was panned by fans and critics alike as dull and preachy. It included Marvel’s first gay superhero and its first deaf one.
Lightyear, a spin-off from Pixar’s celebrated Toy Story film series, was expected to be one of the biggest movies of this summer. Instead, it bombed.
Critics complained that it substituted liberal virtue-signalling — Buzz Lightyear’s commanding officer is a black lesbian and the film features the first same-sex kiss in a Pixar production — for the simple, unpoliticised joys of the original movies.
By contrast, this summer also saw the release of Top Gun: Maverick, a barnstorming reboot of the wildly popular 1986 film Top Gun, an action film about gung-ho American fighter pilots. It has provided a sharp rejoinder to Hollywood bosses who insist their increasingly right-on output is just a reaction to changing audience tastes and social mores.
Worth reading in full.
What with the victories of Maya Forstater and Allison Bailey, the closure of the Tavistock and the two candidates in the Conservative leadership election desperately trying to out anti-woke each other, this hasn’t been a good couple of months for the intersectionality cult.
Is the tide finally beginning to turn?
Stop Press: Suella Braverman’s War on Woke continues, with a blistering attack on the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion industry in Mail+.
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“Is the tide finally beginning to turn?”. No, because the tide is a natural phenomenon, something that is beyond human control. Woke, and all the social ills that accompany it, is not in the hands of nature; it is an orchestrated agenda accepted/driven by elites to subvert the traditional social bonds that hold society in a state of peace and balance. It contributes to the state of social unrest and the mounting feeling of desperation and helplessness. It is an instrument in the elites toolbox that is being used to tune behaviour and thought – ultimately it is a tool of control, one that will not be given up easily.
Just what I was going to write, but you did it better.
Same as all the “pandemic”. They invented the problem, so they get to choose its end date (i.e. never).
And yes, they.
Spot on FL.👍
For the tide to turn, would require that the Woke Brigade be rationale, use reason and logic, and be capable of self-examination.
They don’t. They are zealots who rely on doctrine, emotion, victimology and agression. The Righteous in a sea of heresy must battle on, fighting the good fight.
However. Money is what money is, and investors want a return on their capital. They won’t throw good money after bad.
Makes the ‘Woke Brigade’ sound like a latter day version of the Spanish Inquisition!
These people couldn’t drive a scooter without an electric motor. They’re just a bunch of not overly bright scammers assuming that a rehash of the rehash of a rehash of the HR guidelines of their company must sell if it has the right brand name attached and there’s effectively no competition beyond more of that but with different brand names. Anecdote related to that: Several years ago, a pub named Bierhaus opened in Reading. They’re marketing themselves as authentic independent German bar and restaurant experience The name already marks this as fake Oktoberfest kind of establishment. On posters, they claimed to have Früh Kölsch there. That’s a bit of a well-known German brand of a kind of beer exclusively brewed in Cologne which has a very distinctive, smoked taste. Because of this, I went there one evening. There was a lone guy behind the counter who was obviously pissed off by the idea of being disturbed by customers. On noticing my German accent, he first started shouting some anti-German abuse at me. When he paused that, presumably because he had to breathe, I ordered a Kölsch. What I got was a pint of the standard SAB Miller Anhäuser Busch lemonade… Read more »
All the above is true. However, follow the money and shareholders have the ultimate say and with investment returns going down the toilet and bums on seat’s dwindling, then the men in the grey suits will soon be entering the boardroom.
The tax incentives for films to be produced in the UK are obscene.
I’d prefer to see more tax relief for small and medium sized enterprises that actually offer a potential benefit for the UK.
Corporation tax is a deadweight tax. Taxes are incident on people, and not necessarily on whoever hands over the cash. VAT is handed over by the shopkeeper, but is incident on the customer.
So there are three groups upon whom corporation tax can be incident: business owners – reduced profits; workers – reduced wages/benefits/jobs; consumers – higher prices.
Business management operate to mitigate cost of taxation to owners.
Most economists agree that at least 50% of corporation tax is incident upon workers. The rest appears in higher prices and losses in pension funds and people’s investments. And it also reduces the capital available for reinvestment and economic expansion/job creation/more goodies for consumers.
Yet curiously the general public who lose most by it, are most enthusiastic for it – stick it to all the greedy, rich, fat-cats.
What stupid turkeys they are, voting for Christmas.
The correct corporation tax is zero.
I would say that Hollywood movies have been showing a bias to the political left/progressives for a long time, certainly since the 60s. Because a lot of us grew up with it, we didn’t notice, but when I re-watch films from 60s onwards that I saw when I was growing up (70s onwards) I notice quite a lot of messaging in them that I didn’t at the time. It’s just less subtle now.
They Live (John Carpenter) was/is one of the few antidotes.
Thanks – not seen that one – I will check it out.
Yes, this ‘tide’ CAN turn, but ONLY if those who oppose speak out, only if we fight! And by doing so we give courage to the silent majority who inwardly detest what is happening, whatever they may say (or not say) publicly. If we just gather here together in our own ‘safe place’ we really don’t achieve much…and furthermore if we tell each other ‘it will end when they say it will’ we demotivate it each other rather than motivate, encourage and ’empower’ (nicked that term from the wokies!). A little while ago someone posted an ‘ad’ for Drag Queen Storytime at our local library. There are two social media groups here. One prides itself on being ‘inclusive’. It was of course posted on the second. A couple of posters dared to say what they thought and were soon outnumbered by those accusing them of ‘hate’, ‘bigotry’ etc. So I posted. Quite a few on the group know me from my business. I then switched off notifications as didn’t want to be dragged into the…depths of the hell of arguing with idiots on FB, so just left my little ‘bomb’ there. AS I know that even if it encouraged just… Read more »
Hear hear. I know that my unrelentingly unmasked visage (as ugly as it is) played a small part in turning things. My wife also, never wore the face nappy, all the time serving local customers at our local supermarket.
We make a difference, not to the grand powers’ nasty/ignorant agendas (never), but to the Average Joe’s interpretation of events.
Let the Kings play their nasty games with each other, while we little people party the night away in the forests beneath their castles….
In the end, you have to do what you can do. This may be useless. But not doing anything is guaranteed to be useless.
The value of this is a bit dubious on FB as so-called FB-moderators – an exceptionally useless kind of lowlives – are free to censor anything and punish everyone with total disregard for the so-called terms of use of Facebook. Should they accidentally err on the insufficiently woke side, a complaint can be made to the Facebook oversight board whose task is to rectify that. A typical justification for a decision of that could read While this contribution to our advertising empire didn’t technically violate our terms of use, we found it to be insufficiently in favour of gay sex with minors.
If each of us did a tiny little pushback, spoke up or fought back then that adds up to a lot.
What all of us here are doing, our own little bit, which seems insignificant at the time, adds up & does have an impact.
You’re a Truth Warrior.
Losses can only be written off against profits and in any case the $90 is still spent, capital has a cost and an opportunity cost, so a reduction of tax liability will not mean a recovery of the full amount and associated costs.
Granted Zaslav is trying to turn things around because of how unprofitable woke is in the media (woke-ists will give lots of thumbs up on Twitter, but they won’t actually watch the film) but woke runs throughout the Hollywood mindset.
And just look at who the major institutional shareholders of Warner Bros Discovery are: Vanguard Group Inc. ($454.04M), Credit Suisse AG ($444.28M), BlackRock Inc. ($343.30M), Clearbridge Investments LLC ($241.02M), State Street Corp ($202.53M), Fred Alger Management LLC ($174.50M), and Laurion Capital Management LP ($159.19M)
So the most of the same people who have the major shareholding groups in Coca Cola, Disney, Apple, ViacomCBS and others are ultimately calling the shots at Warner Bros Discovery. Firms such as BlackRock are the ones forcing woke into businesses.
It’s BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street and one or two others who are the controlling shareholder groups in 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies. As long as the giant globalist investment banks are allowed to run riot, nothing will change.
Blackrock et al largely invest other people’s money. I don’t get why they care about wokeness.
Not saying you’re wrong, just interested in your take on it
BlackRock and co are pushing woke concepts such as ESG – ‘stakeholder capitalism’ – on businesses. It’s not old-school business: it’s about control and forcing agendas on the wider community and they’re willing to take a hit on profits for wider influence in the community. Larry Fink is one of the most powerful men in the world you’ve never heard of. Larry Fink’s brother is also a top Biden advisor. The blackmail aspect is that the big investment banks are openly blocking investment in companies that don’t do what they want them to do. That’s what the ESG rating is about. BlackRock and pals can essentially say ‘I don’t like your business and you won’t participate in ESG, so we will refuse to invest in your company and make sure no one else does.’ 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies have the same group of investment banks as their major shareholding block. So the woke activism begins with the owners. Remember the group of big businesses that warned Sunak and Truss against making changes to their environmental ‘commitments’? They all have the same major institutional shareholders. When you look at it, 20th Century Fox wasn’t exactly sold to Disney.… Read more »
Yes but why would rich business people care, or pretend to care, about woke issues to the extent that they are a actively pushing them rather than just reacting to what they perceive is public opinion?
It really is a bunch of abstract, irrelevant drivel that apparently justifies the civil service being implored to “consider who you say hello to in the morning”, and being introduced to their “unconscious biases” and “micro-incivilities”.
Talk about plucking a non-existent problem out of the ether and pouring tens of millions of taxpayers pounds down the toilet after it!
Just like during the pandemic, when people’s actual experience of the pandemic was primarily that of their lives being unnecessarily restricted, and not an experience of a virus, similarly we now see that the gulf separating people’s interpersonal experience of racism or mutual tolerance and respect, from the preachings of the woke apparatchiks, could scarcely be wider.
If 99% of the population is being honest, when would they say that racism or other forms of discrimination was last a priority issue in their lives? I would wager quite a while for most.
Indeed
Sadly it’s not just public sector workplaces that are involved in this bollocks – I know plenty of private sector firms large and small that are signed up
As far as the resistance against the tripartite axis of totalitarianism goes (Covid fanaticism, Net Stupid and Woke evangelism), Wokeism is the lowest hanging fruit. It’s the easiest to dismiss as irrelevant to people’s lives, and hence the simplest to consign to the dustbin of history, where it belongs. The other two, however, dwarf the Woke movement in their potential capacity to get us all sleepwalking into a global technocracy.
Trouble is, woke is cultural. Covid fanaticism and ‘Net Stupid’ are symptoms of culture, so woke is at the root of the problem. Destroy wokeism, and Covid fanaticism and Net Stupid take a major hit, given wokeism is the source of the intolerant conformism needed for COVID-19 authoritarianism and the Net Stupid game, which is designed to destroy our living standards.
Interesting.
In fact, a lot of films get made and are either shelved or given incredibly limited release for a variety of reasons. Remember Danny Boyle’s film ‘Alien Love Triangle’, starring Kenneth Branagh? Nope? It was one part of a three-part portmanteau film, but the other two short films got turned into Guillermo Del Toro’s Mimic and Gary Fleder’s Impostor, so Alien Love Triangle never got released. In order to hold on to the rights to the Fantastic Four in 1994, Constantin Film got Roger Corman’s company to make a very cheap movie, just so they had a film in production by a certain date, which they then shelved, having never intended to release it in the first place – it has only been seen on poor quality bootlegs. And Dimension Films threw together the horrifyingly dreadful Hellraiser: Revelations direct-to-video film in a matter of weeks to avoid losing the rights. Of bigger issue for Warners is the Flash film, where there are allegations about star Ezra Miller bizarre enough that they border on something out of Frank Miller’s Sin City! It can’t be understated how massive the impact of The Flash being delayed is on Warner’s future slate of films.… Read more »
As someone who has the same given name as Batman’s sidekick, just love “Holy woke Batman” 🤣🤣