Kevin Smith Can’t Believe Warner Bros. Canceled ‘Batgirl’ and Not Ezra Miller’s ‘The Flash’

Filmmaker Kevin Smith tore into Warner Bros. for canceling its Batgirl movie and still going forward with The Flash, while the star of the latter, Ezra Miller, remains embroiled in numerous controversies.

In a recent episode of Hollywood Babble-On — Smith’s pop culture podcast with Ralph Garman —Smith quipped, “I don’t give a shit how bad the Batgirl movie is, nobody in that movie … has anything in their real life that you have to market around. But in The Flash movie, we all know there’s a big problem.”

Garman then jumped in, “Yeah, Flash is a supervillain; that’s the problem!”

Miller has been embroiled in various controversies for much of the year, starting with a string of arrests and run-ins with the police in Hawaii. Rolling Stone also reported on an allegation that Miller “stole” music from a pair of musicians they were working with and that, as of June, they were reportedly hosting a 25-year-old mother and her three children at a Vermont farm allegedly filled with unattended guns. While Miller’s arrests this past spring prompted an emergency meeting at Warner Bros. about the star’s future, The Flash appeared to survive the chopping block when the studio announced that Batgirl, and several other projects, were being called off.

Smith did float the possibility that canceling Batgirl might’ve been Warner Bros. “testing the water” to see if they could later get away with canceling The Flash with little uproar. “Because it’s problematic,” Smith continued, “like, how are they gonna market that movie without a leading actor to go out on the road and do press without people being like… ‘I got a bunch of questions — none of them have to do with the movie.’”

Even beyond all the problems posed by The Flash and its star, Smith noted it was an “incredibly bad look” for Warner Bros. to cancel Batgirl, considering it was the rare comic book flick helmed by a Latina actress, Leslie Grace.

“I don’t give a shit if the movie was absolute fucking dog shit — I guarantee you that it wasn’t,” Smith said, alluding to reports that the film was called off because it tested poorly with audiences (Variety, however, also reported that canceling Batgirl might’ve earned Warner Bros. a massive tax write-off). “The two directors [Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi] who directed that movie did a couple of episodes of Ms. Marvel, and it was a wonderful fucking show, and they had more money to do Batgirl than they had to do an episode of Ms. Marvel and stuff.”

From Rolling Stone US.