Why was Batgirl cancelled so late in the production process?

Devastating news came out on Tuesday 2nd August - Batgirl, that has been in production since 2017, has been axed by Warner Bros.

It appears that the merge between HBO Max and Discovery caused this to happen. David Zaslav, the CEO of Discovery says that “[They’re] not going to release a movie until it’s ready”. This is an upsetting thing to hear, as in my experience a film should already be good enough and visualised before production even commences. This begs the question whether enough time was spent in pre-production editing the script and visualising the film to ensure getting axed doesn’t happen?

The lead actress Leslie Grace has described her experiences as “surreal, insane, incredible” which is powerful, as if I was a lead on a show that got unjustly axed, I wouldn’t be so politically correct in my description of my experience. How could the production let this happen?

This just goes to show how the producers and CEO’s at the top of production companies have so much unrecognised power, as it appears the show was only cancelled because Zaslav and other producers didn’t think it was of high quality. But isn’t this just a matter of opinion?

Zaslav’s final remarks, seem to be suggesting that Warner Bros and DC need to head down the line of Marvel theatrical releases to create more profit for their company, therefore they didn’t want to release the $90 Batgirl series on HBO Max as this wouldn’t have created the most profit. Instead, it is likely that Zaslav will start to create a DC universe with strong character films rather than independent series.

I can only hope that this was the right decision as I’m sure there are a lot of people upset at this news. I hope that in the future we are all introduced to a brand new take on the DC universe and characters.