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Leslie Grace Posts Never-Before-Seen Footage From Shelved HBO Max ‘Batgirl’ Movie

Axelle/Bauer-Griffin
Axelle/Bauer-Griffin

Leslie Grace is not just letting HBO Max bury four months of hard work on a shelf.

The Latin pop singer was set to star as the eponymous heroine in Batgirl, until the film was canned by Warner Bros. Discovery in a controversial cost-cutting move last month.

Grace, 27, has now taken to TikTok to let fans into the world of Barbara Gordon.

The short clips, which appear to have been taken from a phone on set, show the actress rehearsing stage combat and being dropped from wires in front of a blue screen, presumably to simulate a steep fall.

One dramatic scene shows the singer struggling in her purple Batgirl costume as she’s choked against a wall by an unseen antagonist.

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The film was shot in Glasgow, Scotland from November 2021 to March 2022. It was one of many casualties in the merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery, which assumed $55 million in debt from Warner properties when the newly created Warner Bros. Discovery went public in April.

In August, company CEO David Zaslav opted to scrap the $90 million movie in order to take a tax write-down. It also represents a strategic shift from Zaslav, who wants to move toward more lucrative theatrical releases as opposed to just tossing films onto streaming libraries. Former employees have expressed concern that programming executives of color, along with titles helmed by actors of color, are being affected the most.

Laid-Off HBO Max Execs Reveal Warner Bros. Discovery Is Killing Off Diversity and Courting ‘Middle America’

In a call with The Daily Beast, a source close to the directors called the cancellation of Batgirl “the final fuck you to Jason Kilar,” referring to the former CEO of WarnerMedia.

The film Scoob! Holiday Haunt was also shelved at the same time, despite being close to finished.

The unreleased Batgirl footage has been a sore spot for those involved in the making of the film, including directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. In a video posted on Instagram earlier this month, the filmmakers revealed they tried to walk away with some of their own work when they first got the call that the movie would be scrapped.

“I called, right away, Martin Walsh, the editor, and said, ‘Yo, you gotta pack up that shit, you know, backup—copy the movie,” El Arbi said.

Bilal added: “Then Adil called me and said, ‘Yo, yo, shoot it on your phone!’ So I went on the server and everything was blocked.”

In a second TikTok posted over the weekend, Grace released a snippet from a new song. The lyric “bad girls get lonely too,” sounds curiously like “Batgirls get lonely too.”

The actress revealed: “Wrote this song during the pandemic.. b4 I even knew ANY of this would be my life.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.

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