Brendan Fraser is Still Salty About Warner Bros. Cancelling 'Batgirl'

Brendan Fraser is enjoying the benefits of his post-Oscar Brenaissance. He’s currently promoting his newest film, the very sweet dramedy Rental Family, and he’s gifted us bisexual millennials with the ultimate gift by announcing he and Rachel Weisz will reunite for a new movie in The Mummy series. We’re so used to giving, and now we get to receive. Fraser’s career revival is one of the undisputed high points of 2020s pop culture history. An actor with immense nostalgic appeal who was poorly treated by the industry got to reinvent himself and win Best Actor in the process. Now, Fraser has the freedom to do basically whatever he wants. And luckily for us, he’s using that clout to sh*t on Warner Bros. for shelving one of his films.

Warner Bros. infamously decided to delete an entire movie, Batgirl, rather than release it because they decided the tax write-off was more valuable than hundreds of people’s hard work. It kicked off a nasty industry trend, as swaths of films and TV series disappeared from streaming services and became practically non-existent unless you pirated them. Batgirl, which was to star Fraser as well as Michael effing Keaton in Batman mode once more, now no longer exists.

Fraser has not been shy in calling out Warner Bros. over this mess. In a recent interview with Associated Press, he was asked about how winning an Oscar changed his career. He mentioned that, while it did give him an undeniable boost, he and many others are ‘still chopping our way through the tall grass of AI and all this stuff. The industry needs a real B-12 or something.’ On the topic of Batgirl, he said:

‘A whole movie [was shelved]. I mean, there were four floors of production in Glasgow. I was sneaking into the art department just to geek out. The tragedy of that is that there’s a generation of little girls who don’t have a heroine to look up to and go, “She looks like me.” I mean, Michael Keaton came back as Batman. The Batman! The product — I’m sorry, “content” — is being commodified to the extent that it’s more valuable to burn it down and get the insurance on it than to give it a shot in the marketplace. I mean, with respect, we could blight itself.’

You can totally hear the Rick O’Connell sass when you read him say, ‘I’m sorry, “content”’, right? And he is, of course, correct. The industry sees everything, from art films to dog food ads to AI slop, as #content. Therefore, it can all be treated the same way and be disposed of without a second thought if there’s an extra cent to be made in doing so. David Zaslav, an astonishingly callous cultural vandal, currently stands to make obscene amounts of money from the sale of Warner Bros. Discovery, a company he helped to culturally devalue in the name of Wall Street boosts. It doesn’t matter whether or not Batgirl was any good. What matters is that thousands of hard-working and probably underpaid people in the entertainment world saw their efforts deleted like a spelling error, and their own future earnings were removed in the process.

If anyone tries to delete The Mummy 4, I will go to war for you, Brendan Fraser.