Some tough language from the Russo brothers this week, who have accused Warner Brothers of “murder” over the recent canning of Batgirl. Speaking to Variety, the Avengers: Endgame directors did not mince their words.
“It’s rare that I can think of something that high profile, that expensive, that was murdered in such a way,” Joe Russo said of the studio’s decision to cancel Batgirl’s release in favour of a tax write-down. “It’s sad, but we’re at a time in the business where [this] is going to rear its head because people are scared.”
Are we really heading back to an era where studios interfere with a director’s vision due to dwindling returns? Batgirl’s cancellation is so notable precisely because it is such a rarity. Perhaps studios have become wary of getting involved because of the chances that the full gory details will be exposed in an in-depth trade magazine report. And even then, in most cases, movies that are taken away from their directors, or otherwise tinkered with, seem prone to performing even more poorly at the box office than those that are left alone.
In 2015, Josh Trank had a dark take on Fantastic Four planned. You can read all about what went wrong in this Polygon piece but, in short, studio 20th Century Fox thought the idea of taking Marvel’s usually bright and breezy foursome and dipping them in murky asphalt was a recipe for disaster. The suits were probably right, but trying to re-edit Trank’s sombre vision into a more coherent, MCU-style event movie didn’t work either. Could the end result have been any worse if somebody had just decided to let Trank go ahead with his original vision?
A year later, David Ayer had Suicide Squad wrested from him by Warner and handed to the guys who had made a zippy trailer for the film, which is like asking the PR guy for the Rolling Stones to get on stage at Madison Square Garden and start belting out Gimme Shelter. Not surprisingly, the results did not go down well, with the movie probably best known for the preposterously awful scene in which Cara Delevingne’s whirling Enchantress takes on the Squad via the magic of bad acting and terrible CGI.
Then there was 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, which was pulled from the The Lego Movie’s Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and handed to an apparently safer pair of hands – Ron Howard. Lord and Miller had wanted to feel their way to a great Star Wars flick by using the off-the-cuff, improvisational style that had proved so successful on their animated effort. Unfortunately, they ended up being quashed in a Vader-style death choke by unconvinced Lucasfilm execs who wanted to do things the traditional way. And yet, despite the studio reportedly hiring a voice coach to help Alden Ehrenreich sound more like Harrison Ford, Howard’s effort was a $76.9m box office bomb that may be remembered as the beginning of the end for George Lucas’s long-running space opera on the big screen.
What if Lord and Miller had been allowed to keep going? Perhaps Ehrenreich would still be strutting his stuff as the Corellian space scoundrel in another classic Star Wars trilogy. We will never know.
What we do know is that on the rare occasion when the “wronged” film-maker does get the opportunity to reimpose their vision, the results can be transformative. The obvious example is 1982’s Blade Runner, which got a mixed reception at the time of its release thanks to a cheesy, Raymond Chandler-esque voiceover that Fox insisted on against the wishes of director Ridley Scott. If you’re ever unfortunate enough to view that edit (and there are still some streaming services that seem to prefer it over the superior 1992 director’s cut) you can almost hear Harrison Ford grinding his own teeth as he squeezes out the hammy dialogue by rote. Thanks to later, Scott-approved versions, Blade Runner is now considered one of the greatest science-fiction movies of all time.
On the other hand, many Star Wars fans are now digging into the gloriously doom-laden Disney+ series Andor, which would not exist had Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy not decided to ease Rogue One director Gareth Edwards out of the cockpit in 2012 and invite Tony Gilroy to oversee reshoots. The final outcome is one of the finest Star Wars films since the original trilogy, and it is Gilroy who now oversees the movie’s prequel series. So studio interference can work out to everyone’s advantage on occasion, even if it usually doesn’t.
