Can we stop with the post title and comment being the same as the content headline already so I don't have to see the same thing 3x?
Maybe add a summary or something insightful
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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Brendan Fraser says 'Batgirl' being shelved shows that movies are being 'commodified' in Hollywood.
First I'm hearing about it.
This is the plot of The Producers
They still had to launch the play to get it to flop and collect the insurance. I feel like that's an important distinction here. We never even got to see if the movie had any redeeming value before WB canned it.
Its because they didn't want to fail at flopping like they did in the producers
It's telling that out of all the DC slop WB was ok with releasing THIS film they were like "no, not this one" so it must have been especially bad.
It’s wild that people put so much effort into creating something, and they have no rights in deciding if it ever gets released.
I’m curious how financial incentives even worked here.
I mean, they'd get more money for a theatrical/streaming release. And it’s not like recent DC cinema has a stellar reputation to “preserve.”
It takes one screwed up corporate system to reject revenue.
It isn't revenue until its revenue, but at any time before that it can be losses for tax purposes.
I mean, they'd get more money for a theatrical/streaming release.
The argument and implied reason for scrapping the film is that they wouldn't. Look at "Shazam! Fury of the Gods" on a budget of ~$125 million the box office return was ~$135 million. Add in the theater split, any level of marketing, etc and the film lost money. For a streaming release you need to ensure you'll retain, ideally gain new subscribers.
The number crunchers ran the numbers and said it wasn't worth it. Although the funny thing is, with all the news about it, they could probably release it now and it would do fine.
That said I don't agree with what happened, it just seems ridiculous.
They already have the enormous cost of production sunk though. I understand not paying for marketing, but projected profit goes from "negative" to "massively negative" if they don't at least license it out to streaming.
It's probably something tax related, but still.
This is classic sunk cost fallacy logic. It's because they had the enormous cost of production sunk, they resisted the fallacy and sinking more money into it since the returns were not favorable.
But this doesn’t apply. This product has like zero per unit cost, and (per reports) it’s all but finished.
Hence the bare minimum cost for getting it out the door is basically nothing. With the state they have, they could use a tiny amount of money to make much, much more, no matter how poorly the movie performs.
The only reasonable explanation is some external benefit to sinking it instead of releasing, like a tax write off.
It's literally all tax-related. Every single thing, not just Hollywood and movies.
If something doesn't make sense to us, it probably makes sense to the people who actually do the math on a regular basis.
Yeah.
An anecdote: AT&T was having a fire sale on the base iPhone 16 Plus, like so cheap that it must have been a loss. It didn’t make any sense to me, but an employee speculated that, since it was their worst selling model of the lineup, they were clearing the inventory and writing it off as a loss to compensate for some other transactions.
To
I don’t disagree with Mr Fraser’s observations, but … hasn’t Hollywood always been this way? If one wants cinematic art, it’s never come from these big studios.
I keep noticing people talking about problems in cinema like they're new and it's kinda weird. Corpos bought up the studios and took over the industry way back in black-and-white times. If anything, the lower bar for entry in modern times has made it easier for art to be made without the approval and funding of capitalists. (Not to downplay said problems. They're still awful.)
It's because we haven't done enough trust-busting in the last few decades. Back in the day, the government said it was anticompetitive for a movie studio to own a theatre. But somehow today it's okay for Disney to own every IP, and their own streaming platform
Disney, Amazon, and Walmart. What other corporations run the world?
My son is a budding filmmaker, and we talk about this a lot.
Young filmmakers often don't realize what miraculous times they live in. You can literally use the phone in your pocket to shoot a movie, edit it on your computer with free software, and then release it to the world on various video platforms, and even generate revenue, all without a nickel of studio or investor support.
But if all you want to do is make Marvel movies, then yeah, you have to sell your soul to The System.
Reminds me a bit of how South Park parodied Marvel & streaming services a few years ago…
“Netflix, you’re green-lit. Who am I speaking with?”
Rick & Morty did the same exact thing with the heist episode. Like, the B-plot was almost literally the South Park Netflix episode's
Previously there'd be a shake-up every few decades that allowed a new crop of people with some fresh ideas to get their foot in the door, whether it was the switch from silent to talkies, the attempts to compete with television, the end of the Hayes Code, the special effects revolution, etc. There hasn't been one of these in a long time, though, so the industry has become a lot more incestuous.
But... "art for art's sake"! You mean they lied to us for all those years?
Looks like the wax museum version of Henry Kissinger 😌
Is that also why those that do get made suck? They be trying to pull a Producers? 🤔
Ok batgirl isn’t some sort of high art.. it is a movie version of a Big Mac. It only exists to make money.
So someone crunched the numbers and realized they can make the same money by dumping it.
When did Brendan Frasier become young Drew Carey?