In August 2022, Hollywood experienced a major shakeup with Batgirl’s release being scrapped. Rather than this being a case of a movie being shelved early into its development or even right before production kicked off, the DC movie had already been shot, and the plan had been to release it exclusively to Max subscribers. Instead, we’ll now never see Leslie Grace’s platform to shine as Barbara Gordon, which was especially disheartening to Batgirl’s directors, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. However, one of the few silver linings from this monumental decision was that they received a wise tip from Will Smith, whom they’d worked with on Bad Boys for Life.
When the Batgirl news broke, El Arbi and Fallah were in Morocco for the former’s wedding, so it was an exceptional case of bad timing. Smith also attended the event, and two days after the nuptials, he gave the following words of wisdom to the filmmaking duo, as El Arbi recalled to Variety:
