DC cancels Batgirl movie, Netflix cancels First Kill

We’ve got a raft of cancellations to report this morning as studios slash upcoming projects left and right. First up is First Kill, the young adult vampire series that debuted its first season on Netflix in June. The queer supernatural drama quickly gained a passionate following, but “passionate” doesn’t necessarily equal “large”…or at least not large enough for Netflix’s liking.

According to Deadline, while First Kill racked up over 100 million hours viewed and spent some time in Netflix’s top 10, it still didn’t meet Netflix’s required benchmarks for hours viewed nor episodes completed. We can question whether there should be more room allowed for fan response or people who believe in a series, but that’s not the way Netflix works these days; if you don’t get past the numbers Netflix has in its little spreadsheet, you’re out.

I imagine the cancellation went a little something like this:

Warner Bros. Discovery cancels Batgirl even though they already shot the whole thing

In other cancellation news, Warner Bros. Discovery has pulled the plug on Batgirl, an upcoming HBO Max movie starring Leslie Grace in the title role, Michael Keaton as Batman, and Brendan Fraser as bad guy Firefly. Ooh, I probably would have watched that.

This one is weirder. For one thing, shooting on the movie was done; Warner Bros. spent $90 million making this thing, and it’s very odd for a studio not to want to try and recoup at least some of those costs by…y’know…releasing the movie. But according to Variety, the movie was a casualty of a shift in studio strategy.

Batgirl was originally planned as an original movie to air on HBO Max. But Warner Bros. recently merged with Discovery to become Warner Bros. Discovery, and the new management wants to put less focus on mid-budget fare like this and more on huge theatrical blockbuster films. (It’s also looking like they want to deemphasize HBO Max in general, but that’s a developing story.) Why they couldn’t release a relatively smaller movie like Batgirl and then also release other movies, I don’t know, but that’s the decision. There have also been reports of disastrous test screenings. We’ll probably never know the full calculus here.

In situations like this, it helps to remember that quality and reason are only two of the factors that go into making movies; chaos, confusion, madness and incompetence are also extremely important. And all of those things have played a huge part in the last decade of DC movies.

The cancellation is doubly weird because the studio has another big-budget DC movie on the horizon that’s getting a lot of heat: The Flash, starring human disaster area Ezra Miller. The actor has come under fire for numerous, very serious scandals, but presumably Warner Bros. Discovery will still release that movie sometime next year, because it already spent a lot of money on it and it’s a big blockbuster. It also spend a lot of money on Batgirl, but it won’t release that, because it didn’t spend enough a lot of money. You follow me?

In conclusion, the movie and TV industries are run by ding dongs who think “LMNO” is one letter. More at eleven.

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