The Batgirl test screening scores were lower than recent DC fare, I'm told. And I talked to someone who attended a screening and said it played like a CW pilot: low stakes, thin characters, light action, and a twisty, convoluted plot. When viewers were asked after the screening if the movie felt "big"—Warners' effort to discern whether it could justify the elevated budget by releasing it theatrically—they emphatically responded "no," according to this source. Meaning no amount of reshoots or C.G.I. would polish this direct-to-video turd into a theatrical diamond.
That's not necessarily DC chief Walter Hamada's fault; he was making the pricey streaming movie that Jason Kilar, the former WarnerMedia C.E.O. under AT&T, and Toby Emmerich, the ex-Warners film chief, told him to make. A $90 million CW pilot was the strategy, not an anomaly, though presumably they asked Hamada to make it a good CW pilot.
But now, like so many recent pivots at Warners under its various owners, there's a new leader and a new strategy. Less Netflix-style volume, more HBO-style quality (but broader!), and superhero movies should be events for theaters first. Zaslav and C.F.O. Gunnar Wiedenfels, the Butcher's Hatchet Man, both newcomers to the film business, just aren't going to spend that amount of money on direct-to-streaming movies. "We cannot find an economic case for it," Zaslav said on the company earnings call today. What he really means is that the stock market no longer values wild spending for sub growth. And he's got so many financial pressures to deal with.
