Five ambitious blockbuster films that were completed but the world will never get to see

Three years ago, The Batman saw Robert Pattinson become the latest Hollywood star to play Bruce Wayne, the Gotham City billionaire who leads a double life as the DC franchise’s eponymous superhero.

A film that generally received positive reviews - it has an 85% ‘fresh’ rating on the review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes - The Batman took nearly $800 million worldwide after its release in March 2022.

Such a financial return made it the seventh-highest grossing movie of the year, per Box Office Mojo.

Planned as part of a trilogy, The Batman is due to be followed by a sequel slated for release in late 2027, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

But around the same time as The Batman was hitting the silver screen, a film from the same superhero universe - Batgirl - was being canned by movie executives.

Made by new management at Warner Bros. Discovery, the decision came despite the fact that filming on the project had already wrapped.

Batgirl is one of a number of pictures highlighted in a recent article by Nexstar journalist Michael Bartiromo, who looks back over some of the most prominent examples of all-but-completed projects that failed to see the light of day.

“Not releasable”

Starring Leslie Grace in the titular role, Batgirl was pulled while it was in post-production in summer 2022, with a source telling the New York Post that studio chiefs found the film “unspeakable” and “irredeemable”.

Citing quotes published by Variety, Bartiromo notes that Peter Safran, the co-CEO of the Warner Bros.-owned DC Studios, described Batgirl as “not releasable”.

Safran told Variety: “I actually think that [president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery David] Zaslav and the team made a very bold and courageous decision to cancel it because it would have hurt DC. It would have hurt those people involved.”

The Guardian’s Sian Cain notes that the reported $100m budget behind Batgirl - a film that also featured actors including J.K. Simmons, Brendan Fraser and Michael Keaton - makes the picture one of the most expensive ever to be cancelled in Hollywood history.

Batgirl, Bartiromo notes, joins a line-up of major last-minute cancellations that also includes a Pharrell Williams-inspired musical; a Charlie Chaplin-produced silent film; a project led by Jerry Lewis; and a Gore Vidal biopic.

“There wasn’t a path forward”

Golden, a Williams-produced comedy-drama about the childhood of the musician and fashion designer, was scheduled for release this year. Directed by Michel Gondry, it included Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph among its cast.

However, the film was scrapped during post-production as it “was not living up to their [Gondry and Williams’] expectations”, Bartiromo explains, quoting a joint statement in which the pair told Variety: “There wasn’t a path forward to tell the version of this story that we originally envisioned.”

A few years before the failed Batgirl and Golden projects, Netflix’s House of Cards star Kevin Spacey was hired as the lead actor in Gore, a movie made for the streaming giant about the writer’s life and career.

Having been shot in 2017, Gore was cancelled after multiple sexual misconduct allegations emerged against Spacey, who was also written out of House of Cards. (In legal cases in the U.S. and the U.K., the 65-year-old has since been acquitted of, or deemed not liable for, the accusations against him.)

Going further back into Hollywood history, Bartiromo also points to two major 20th-century projects that were binned at the 11th hour.

“Ashamed”

In the early 1970s, the comic actor Lewis directed, wrote and starred in The Day the Clown Cried, a drama about a German clown sent to a concentration camp during the Nazi regime. Filming proved so disastrous, however, that Lewis later described himself as “embarrassed” and “ashamed” by the project.

Half a century earlier, Chaplin produced A Woman of the Sea - a film which, starring the silent-movie icon Edna Purviance, “had the makings of an early classic”, Bartiromo recalls.

But when Chaplin decided he didn’t like the end result, the legendary British filmmaker “arranged to have the film negatives burned - in front of multiple witnesses”.

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