Warner Bros Discovery CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels defends the cancelation of Batgirl, claiming the media blew it out of proportion.
Last month Warner Bros Discovery made the controversial decision to cancel the planned Batgirl film. When questioned on the matter, CEO David Zaslav stated that the new people in charge of the company simply didn’t believe in it. It would the first of several controversial moves the company made throughout the month.
The CFO Defends The Position
Since the announcement came through, the various cast and crew members have spoken out against Warner Bros Discovery’s decision. The people at top of the company, however, have doubled down on defending the decision. While speaking at the Bank of America Securities Media, Communications & Entertainment Conference, CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels defended the decision to shelve Batgirl, stating that the decision had been blown out of proportions:
“To me, you know, it’s blown out of proportion a little bit, in terms of the attention externally. The focus is, on a go-forward basis here, we’re spending more than ever in the history of the two legacy companies on content. We’re continuing to make significant investments — [but] we’ll make them differently.”
The CFO blamed the media for causing the story to blow up:
“Media likes to talk about media, I guess. I don’t think it is unusual. We are a creative industry and one of the elements of creativity is that there is judgment and views on what the potential of what a certain piece of [intellectual property] might be.”
Wiedenfels then went on to defend the company’s cutbacks:
“Clearly, the course corrections, making changes quickly where we don’t agree with the track that WarnerMedia was on, that took a lot of courage and execution early.”
The Batgirl film was set to star In the Heights’ Leslie Grace. Batgirl was last seen on the big screen in live-action portrayed by Alicia Silverstone in Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin in 1997. The film followed the Barbara Gordon iteration of the Gotham City heroine. J.K. Simmons was also in the film as Commissioner Gordon, Brendan Fraser as the villain Firefly, and Michael Keaton returned to play his version of Batman.
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Source: Variety
