Until now, Leslie Grace was best known as a singer who celebrated success with Latin pop. “Batgirl” should have been her breakthrough as an actress: The 27-year-old plays the leading role in the superhero film. But despite production costs of 90 million dollars, Warner Bros. decided to let the film disappear in the poison cupboard rather than bring it to the cinemas. This makes “Batgirl” one of the most expensive unreleased projects in Hollywood history.
But there are a number of other prominent film projects that never made it into the cinemas. And it affected prominent artists, such as comedian Jerry Lewis. In 1972, with “The Day the Clown Cried”, he made an ambitious attempt to use the story of a clown to tell the story of the Holocaust. In the final scene, the clown ran hand in hand into the gas chamber together with a Jewish girl. Lewis himself pulled the ripcord: “I was deeply ashamed … my work was bad … both as a writer, as a director, as an actor and as a producer … nothing was good,” said the artist, who died in 2017, later.
While no one has yet seen Jerry Lewis’ failed work, another comedian has taken it a step further: Louis CK screened his self-written and filmed comedy-drama ‘I Love You, Daddy’ at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival brought. Shortly thereafter, allegations were made that the comedian should have sexually harassed women. The distribution company The Orchid then withdrew the film.
Personal misconduct also brought down Aziz Ansari’s debut film “Being Mortal”: Bill Murray is said to have behaved so badly on the set that the studio stopped production. “I did something that I thought would be funny, but it didn’t go over well,” Murray said ruefully. Whether it will continue at some point is still in the stars.
Big, big was the motto of Chinese billionaire Jon Jiang. He not only put 130 million dollars in the 3D fantasy film “Empires of the Deep”. Instead, he immediately planned a trilogy that would take on role models like “Lord of the Rings”. In the end, it was just a film – and nobody even got to see it: the mammoth work couldn’t find a distribution partner.
And a well-known German producer also failed with a film project in 1994: Bernd Eichinger, together with legendary producer Roger Corman, wanted to bring the first live-action adaptation of the Marvel superhero team “The Fantastic Four” to the cinemas. That failed, but the damage should have been limited: The budget was only 1.5 million dollars – the 60th part of what “Batgirl” devoured.
