The Avengers and the Justice League were assembled onto the big screen thanks to writer-director Joss Whedon. Too bad he can’t assemble a Batgirl movie too.
After months of pre-production, Avengers director Joss Whedon announced this week that he would be stepping away from directing Batgirl, citing a lack of creative inspiration to write a premise for the film. Reported to be helming a Batgirl movie back in March 2017, many fans were excited at the possibility of Whedon directing a DC movie.
Obviously, their hopes fell a little short of expectations.
This isn’t the first time Whedon was involved with a DC property. When Justice League director Zack Snyder had to step away from production in May 2017 due to a personal tragedy, Whedon stepped in as co-director to help oversee reshoots and post-production. His work as director was later criticized for interjecting forced humor into Snyder’s vision, as well as that facial hair controversy where he made the visual effects team digitally remove Henry Cavill’s mustache in post-production (the effects, as you can see above, were nothing short of terrible.) In 2007, he was also slated to write and direct an adaptation for Wonder Woman long before actress Gal Gadot and director Patty Jenkins were attached to the project. Again, his work received a lot of backlash from the comic-book community, mostly for overtly sexualizing his female characters while at the same time toxically characterizing some of the male figures in the script.
Maybe it’s a good thing that he’s no longer attached to directing Batgirl.
With Whedon’s removal, Warner Bros. is currently on the market for a new female director to take over for the project. The next film to be released on the DCEU’s slate is James Wan’s Aquaman, which is scheduled for release in December later this year.
– David Dunn
SOURCE: Screenrant, ComicBookMovie.com
DAVID DUNN 