The betrayal Brendan Fraser will never forgive: “What did we learn from this?”
In one of modern Hollywood’s most welcome developments, Brendan Fraser has come roaring back to the forefront of the cinematic consciousness after years in the wilderness, and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
He’s always been viewed as one of the most effortlessly likeable people in the industry, and while his days of using his charm and charisma to anchor big-budget blockbusters are largely over, with the obvious exception of in-development nostalgia bait, The Mummy 4, winning an Oscar more than makes up for it.
Fraser’s ‘Best Actor’ win for Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale was thoroughly deserved, and while he hasn’t quite maintained the dizzying heights of his career’s greatest moment, he hasn’t suffered from the ‘Oscars curse’ either. Instead, he’s been working away, safe in the knowledge that he’s unlikely to go out of fashion again for a long time yet.
However, just because he’s spent the last three decades as a beacon of wholesomeness, optimism, and positivity, it doesn’t mean he can’t get pissed off. It’s bad enough for an actor when they make a movie that never gets released, but in Fraser’s case, it’s happened twice.
The first came when he lent his name to the animated feature, Big Bug Man, which was supposed to be Marlon Brando’s final performance. In the end, the production was quietly cancelled and swept under the rug, and he must have been wondering how the gods of cinema had conspired against him when Batgirl suffered a similar fate.
The comic book adaptation, helmed by Bad Boys for Life duo Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, saw Fraser cast as the villainous Firefly, opposite Leslie Grace’s title hero and Michael Keaton’s Batman. Filming was in the can, and it was deep in post-production when Warner Bros completely pulled the plug, citing financial reasons as the driving factor behind axing an expensive superhero blockbuster.
“The fans really wanted to see this film made,” he rued. “Leslie Grace is a dynamo. The movie was shot and conceived for a smaller screen. In this age that we’ve come out of now between streaming service versus theatrical release, it would up being the canary in the coal mine. What did we learn from this? Work with trusted filmmakers.”
Those comments came in September 2022, a month after the studio had locked Batgirl away in the vault, never to be seen by anyone. Three years later, and Fraser still wasn’t over it. “The tragedy of that is there’s a generation of little girls who don’t have a heroine to go up to and go, ‘She looks like me,'” he explained. “I mean, Michael Keaton came back as Batman! The Batman!”
Taking another shot at the penny-pinchers in Warner Bros headquarters, Fraser made his feelings perfectly clear: “The product… I’m sorry, ‘content’, is being commodified to the extent that it’s more valuable to burn it down and get the insurance on it than to give it a shot in the marketplace,” he added. “I mean, with respect, we could blight itself.”
Unless something drastic changes, which it probably won’t, Batgirl will remain unreleased and unseen.
