And here you thought I was done with Batgirl. Welllll, almost. A few days after the news broke that DC/WB was pulling Batgirl, this article was published at NewsBytes: https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/entertainment/details-behind-dc-s-batgirl-getting-shelved/story. The folks at NewsBytes are not pleased that Black Adam and Shazam 2 had pre-screening scores as bad as those for Batgirl, but will still be released. Though not explicitly stated, the implication is that this could be a result of sExIsM. After all, both Black Adam and Shazam are men, whereas Batgirl is a woman (though you could be excused for thinking otherwise from the movie stills, but I already talked about that).
I’m sorry to say this, NewsBytes, but there is a little more going on here. Black Adam and Shazam 2 both have something that Batgirl does not: an existing fan base.
Shazam (2019) scored an 82% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, one of the few DC properties to crack 80% since Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, and it pulled in a respectable $366 million at the box office. Not earth-shattering, but respectable. Combined, these all but guaranteed a sequel. DC/WB is betting that the folks who enjoyed the first Shazam movie will show up for the second, and it’s as safe a bet as you can make in the fickle world of Hollywood.
As it so happens, it’s getting not just one sequel, but one-and-a-half. Kind of. Black Adam is a long-time member of the Shazam universe, going as far back as 1945, when Shazam was published by Fawcett Comics. Granted, he is new to the cineplex and doesn’t necessarily have quite the name recognition that Shazam has, but Black Adam has a secret weapon in the person of Dwayne Johnson. And Mr. Johnson has an enormous fan base.
Let’s face facts. Batgirl has never been one of the biggest titles at DC. She is an accessory character, riding the cape-tails of Batman to modest success, occasionally given her own title, but never fully breaking out on her own. In other words, Batgirl, herself, lacks a dedicated fan base. As for the movie, Leslie Grace is not what you can call a marquee name. Not yet, anyway. I doubt many could pick her out walking down the street. Dwayne Johnson, on the other hand, can’t hang out in a yurt in the middle of Mongolia in a disguise without being recognized immediately.
So to the good folks at NewsBytes, DC/WB’s decision to pull Batgirl but release Black Adam and Shazam 2 is not a result of SeXiSm, or any ism, but cold, hard, economics. Money talks, and in this case it’s saying “give that one a pass”. $90 million is a lot of money to lose when pulling a movie from distribution, but it’s nowhere near as much as if they embarked on a full-scale advertising and promotion campaign. Those campaigns, along with the distribution costs, can add up to as much as making the movie, which would double the already substantial price tag. With the poor screening scores, it’s not hard to imagine DC/WB executives thinking twice about investing nearly 200 million dollars in a second-tier super-heroine film starring a relatively uknown actress. They stand a much better chance of making their money back with Black Adam and Shazam 2 than with Batgirl.
With that in mind, let’s stop wasting energy looking for reasons to be offended, and instead spend our time and energy developing titles that people want.
Titles like Judge. 😉