Hacker Cinema
Batgirl
1967 · Film · short · 8 min
Directed by William Dozier
Promotional short introducing librarian Barbara Gordon as Batgirl for the series "Batman (1966)". Barbara meets Bruce Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson at the Gotham Public Library and is able to help them battling Killer Moth and his gang.
3 negative11 neutralfrom 14 commenters
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14 comments on Hacker News
If its so valuable why are HBO and Disney killing already produced content making it unavailable (legally) on or off their platform. Why is the Willow TV show (sequel to the classic movie) removed it was one of their flagship early offering when they were starting their streaming service. Why is HBO killing finished movies like Batgirl and Wiley Coyote v Acme for the tax right off if they are such precious valuable content? Why is classic Looney Toons being broken up and sublicensed to everchanging array of shit tier streaming services. none of these moves makes since with the reason given
I think we are saying the same thing. Companies chase high risk high reward over low risk low reward.
Presumably, curing a genetic disorder for a very small number of people using existing technology is low risk and low reward.
> Why wouldn't it be sold if it were available?
Just because something works in a small lab doesn’t mean it’s ready to sell. To launch a product, companies need to do a lot more: testing, certifications, licenses, marketing, training, and more. Sometimes, even when a product is finished, companies decide not to launch it if their budget or priorities shift elsewhere.
A related example could be unreleased movies like Batgirl Or Coyote vs. Acme. The films were completed, but they felt their marketing dollars would be better spent on other projects.
I don't think they need to claim that "no one would pay even $1 for the rights to the movie in its current state" but rather the lesser "in our judgment, the best thing for us as a profit-seeking studio is for us to not release this movie".
Damage to the Batgirl franchise brand, damage to the studio reputation, damage to the relationship with the stars, legal fees, etc. could all be reasonably factored in to the studio's judgment to scrap the current WIP.
I wonder, is it even possible to truly delete a movie?
I am surprised Batgirl didn't leak. How do you even prevent that?
It's just bits.
I'm sure internal politics plays a large role. Managers knee-capping each other and so forth.
But there is another way to look at it. A company of Google's size will not be satisfied by a "small" $10M ARR business or perhaps even a $100M ARR business. It's not going to move the needle. The needle being, effectively, Google's stock price.
There are two ways to move the stock price: increased profit or decreased spend. Increase the pie or stop the number of people eating the existing pie.
All of those projects had more value in being ritualistic offerings to the stock gods. Much like the unreleased Batgirl film had more value being a tax write-off than selling for market value: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batgirl_(film)
Well, so can Hollywood. The completed but unreleased Batgirl movie was simply deleted.
Right. But take, for example, Warner Bros. Discovery.
$40 billion in revenue yearly, $50+ billion in debt needing servicing, annual gross profit $13 billion, Market cap $32 billion. They aren't exactly the world's healthiest company.
What's the plan? "World-class" Cost-cutting and price hikes, everywhere. Even if it's multiple 95%-finished movies (Scoob! Holiday Haunt, Batgirl), send them to the shredder for the tax write-off if their success is uncertain. Taking risks or releasing anything that possibly won't be a hit, is not affordable at the moment.
What about Disney? Disney+ is losing $4 billion every year, and now has a lawsuit ongoing about whether the projections of profitability were ever reasonable. And it has also become apparent to investors that the content deluge and the expectations it set has caused massive damage to Marvel, as well as Pixar's Box Office profits. Pixar's Elemental, for example, just had the second-worst box office opening after the original Toy Story... except that Toy Story opened with 28 years less inflation, and on a Wednesday. The good news for Disney is that Elemental has had quite a recovery, even if it almost certainly won't break-even.
Now you've got this quibble with the Writer's Guild; at the same time that making new content to prop up streaming numbers has never been under more scrutiny, and the pocketbook has not been such a concern in years. You can afford to take a break - heck, you might have even been considering taking a break anyway; and by taking a break you can theoretically win a better deal with the Writers to save even more money in the future.
> it was so bad [...] there was nothing salvageable
[1] disagrees. Do you have a better source?
"Batgirl’s test score, which was for a director’s cut, is comparable to scores for the first It (2017), which wound up grossing $700.3 million globally, as well as an early score for the upcoming Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Both of those films tested in the 60s."
(SFOTG is, admittedly, a bit of a flop sitting on about $130m gross currently.)
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/batgirl-hbo-max-movie-dc-canceled-1235191932/
> This includes the Batgirl movie, which was in post-production at the time.
They screened it and it was so bad they threw it and the 90mil they spent on it in the bin as there was nothing salvageable. Sometimes, despite all hard work and good intentions, the final result is still trash.
If it was going to make a billion at the box office, they would not "write it off" for tax purposes.
Zaslav, of course, is famous for killing a lot of in-production Warner Bros. projects to take a tax write-off on them when he took over. This includes the Batgirl movie, which was in post-production at the time. Crazy to think how many people worked for years on that film only to have it all thrown away at the end like that. If I'd been heavily involved in making it I might have left the industry after that.
This may shed some light on their thinking: https://collider.com/disney-plus-hulu-content-purge/:
> Unfortunately, Disney is preparing to make many movies and TV shows inaccessible. During the meeting, CFO Christine McCarthy says the company “will be removing certain content from our streaming platforms and currently expect to take an impairment charge of approximately $1.5 to $1.8 billion.” An impairment charge is used by a company to get rid of unprofitable products, taking them out of the market for good. It’s a process similar to what Warner Bros. Discovery did with Batgirl and other Max productions, which risk never being available to the public. So, while the strategy might make sense for executives that ignore the artistic value of films and TV shows, the content purge means many productions could be lost forever.
IIRC, Batgirl was a fully completed movie that was figuratively destroyed to take a tax write-off.
Is this related to the Batgirl situation, where they shelved a practically finished movie for accounting reasons?
The most interesting aspect of Fan-baiting, is how Hollywood executives have weaponized actors and other people involved in movies for profit. They're basically using them as shields against the fans, with promises of leading roles and paychecks.
Recent examples of this are Rings of Power, Ariel, Pinocchio, She-Hulk, and several other shows and movies. Look beyond the racism, which is a vocal minority, and look at how they use these said vocal minorities, to counter valid criticism. Look at how Hollywood utilized Moses Ingram (Reva Sevander) from Kenobi as a shield, to dismiss the very valid criticism of how her character was written and directed, by grasping on to the few racist comments. Suddenly, if you criticized her character, you were a racist.
Think about every single time a show comes out, and a handful of tweets, screenshots from places like 4chan, or some Discord servers, are used as excuses to invalidated any and all criticism a show is getting. All the while the controversy generates buzz, with the media acting like ravenous dogs putting out article after article for weeks and months (look at Batgirl's cancellation and how they milked it for a month without knowing if it was a good movie or not), all the while having the actors take a stand as shields, and the fans who act like knights in shining armor, come to their defense, oblivious to the exploitation by the Hollywood executives.
Again, is there "isms"? Without a shadow of a doubt. Is it the majority of the criticism these shows and movies get? Not even close.
Now think about the professional critics, and Youtubers and such, and how they walk on egg-shells. Look at how shows are getting perfect scores because of their diverse cast, all the while being panned by the fans who are actually consuming the shows. You can't voice your criticism without fear of getting cancelled, getting your access revoke, or worse, people actively going after your job.
Is Batgirl a radically different direction in this movie than where she was historically?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n00xZ_mKQgk
Or her first footage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQYwEuQJXQU