As Joker: Folie a Deux landed in theaters this weekend with a thud, the latest DC bomb unsurprisingly became the biggest subject of discourse among both movie and comic book fans on social media. One recurring theme was all of the recent missed opportunities that Warner Bros. has failed to take advantage of, and all the bad judgment calls they seem to make every time they’re given a chance. One big example of this is the cancelled Batgirl movie, which tends to come up every time Warners has a major bomb, or when another movie is sent to the scrapheap.
Batgirl, which starred Leslie Grace in the title role, would have seen her mentored by an older Batman (Michael Keaton) while hiding her superhero identity from her father (J.K. Simmons) and facing off with Firefly (Brendan Fraser). The movie cost a reported $90 million, and was originally intended to be a Max original. Shortly after Discovery bought up Warner Bros., new executives decided to drastically reduce the amount of money they were spending on Max originals.
Since it was a big IP, Batgirl was reportedly considered as a potential theatrical release, but its modest budget and the fact that it was originally intended to be played on small screens worked against it, supposedly making the movie feel “cheap” when it was blown up on the big screen.
Around this time, a number of projects were cancelled or shelved that fit into these same basic guidelines: too big for Max, not ready for theaters. In a small number of cases, including Batgirl‘s, the movies were almost completed when they got canned. The film has reportedly had mixed test screenings, but ultimately it wasn’t a creative decision so much as a financial one to scrap it: by killing the movie and writing it down as bad debt, Warner Bros. Discovery reportedly recouped around $30 million in tax benefits.
Fans were outraged, the filmmakers were rightly upset (except, apparently, for Michael Keaton who took the paycheck and ran), and there have been semi-regular musings online about how the movie might be resurrected. It would be difficult to do, because the movie wasn’t 100% complete. That means whoever wanted to release it would have to both pay to finish the movie and also pay the government its $30 back, since part of the write-down process is that WBD had to promise never to monetize the project.
That brings us back to Joker: Folie a Deux. It’s hard to compare the two, since obviously the first Joker was a runaway success, earning over $1 billion and passing the Deadpool movies as the highest-grossing R-rated comic book adaptation. That’s a title it only lost to Deadpool & Wolverine earlier this year. That means it was reasonable for Warner Bros. to expect a decent return on the sequel. Still, they stacked the deck (get it? Because Joker?) against themselves in a pretty significant way this time around.
The reported budget for Joker was somewhere between $50 and $75 million, depending on your source. That’s obviously a pretty modest budget for a comic book movie, and when paired with its enormous box office, it will likely remain the most profitable comics adaptation for years to come. With the second movie, though, Warners spent a reported $200 million. That means that movie would have to gross roughly $400 million in order to break even after you account for the cost of marketing and distribution. While that’s a pretty reasonable ask, considering the scale of the first movie’s success, it definitely gives the movie an immediate disadvantage that neither Joker nor Batgirl had.
In the case of Batgirl, Warner Bros. and DC were likely hoping for the movie to ride the coattails of The Flash, in which Keaton’s Batman was reintroduced and played a key role. Sadly, that movie became one of the most expensive flops in Warner Bros. history, meaning it had no coattails to ride — not that it mattered, since Batgirl was cancelled before The Flash ever came out.
Joker: Folie a Deux opened at $40 million at the domestic box office, about $15 million shy of what The Flash managed. Globally, it earned around $121 million — which is around $18 million shy of The Flash. The movie is obviously not the magnitude of bomb that The Flash was, since the latter movie reportedly cost more than $300 million and also featured cameos by Batman and Wonder Woman. Still, Warner Bros. can’t be excited about the possibility of making Flash money — that film ended its theatrical run with $271,433,313 — especially with stockholders already tired of massive stock losses since Discovery took over.
The highly-leveraged way Discovery bought out Warner Bros. means they need to start making some serious money this year so that they don’t miss loan payments. While CEO David Zaslav has been fairly good at cutting costs during his time at the helm, he has done so at the expense of relationships with talent and the audience. The Batgirl mess, followed by the absolute debacle of Warner cancelling Coyote vs. Acme in spite of euphoric test screenings, paint an easy picture for even casual observers to understand in terms of what many perceive is going wrong at WBD. With the stock down around 75% since Discovery took over and bills coming due, Zaslav is finally facing his first serious pressure internally, and a huge flop like this won’t help Warners, DC, or Zaslav.
Last year, Warners had Barbie to point to as a huge success, and while the studio was still bleeding money, there were high hopes for a number of 2024 and 2025 projects, including Joker and Superman. Fans online have pointed out that while Zaslav and company used lukewarm test screenings as part of their premise for why Batgirl was not releasable, they didn’t even screen Joker: Folie a Deux for audiences, potentially suggesting that they knew they had a bomb on their hands and didn’t want the word to get out.
All of this is how Batgirl ended up trending on microblogging sites like Threads and X/Twitter this weekend, with fans calling out the apparent absurdity of spending $200 million on a movie, and then releasing it, even while they admit they were rewriting the script on the fly during production.
“With the release of Joker 2, it’s time for the regular reminder that there is absolutely NO WAY that the movie that would ‘hurt the DC brand’ was Batgirl. That just simply isn’t true,” said Threads user CasedCrusader, before going on to joke that maybe they were holding onto Batgirl to release following the DC Universe reboot.
“The Zaslav crew couldn’t release this but have released stinkers like The Flash, Joker 2 and Aquaman 2,” pointed out user PhillyAxle. “While the Batgirl directors moved on and gave Sony a hit with this summer’s Bad Boys movie.”
With Aquaman: The Lost Kingdom and Joker: Folie a Deux out of the way, producers James Gunn and Peter Safran are ready to reshape DC’s brand. Hopefully the stink of a recent string of failures won’t make that harder than it already is.
