Shazam! Fury of the Gods may have stolen the thunder as the biggest flop in the history of the DCU, but two of the franchise’s most notable failures – albeit for completely different reasons – are Birds of Prey and Batgirl.
The former was slapped with an R-rating to try and distinguish it from the pack, only for the decision to alienate the majority of the comic book genre’s target audience to backfire spectacularly when it flopped at the box office. Meanwhile, the latter was canceled after shooting had already been completed, with Warner Bros. turning a $90 million investment into a tax write-off as rumors persisted the end product was so terrible it was better off locked away in the vault.
Curiously, such a pair of colossal failures had been inadvertently foreshadowed almost two decades beforehand, when The WB’s episodic version of Birds of Prey starring Batgirl as one of its main characters was axed after a single 13-episode season in the face of scathing reviews and plummeting ratings.
There’s a lot of people out there who probably have no idea it even existed, which sounds strange given that it aired almost immediately after Smallville had given the DC mythology a network-friendly makeover, but a hardy band of Redditors have nonetheless stepped out of the shadows to try and state the case that it deserved better than it got.
It probably didn’t, despite some decent creative flourishes and impeccable costuming for some of the many DC favorites to appear across its one-and-done stretch of adventures, but maybe the Birds of Prey and Batgirl are simply cursed when it comes to live-action.