Batgirl composer Natalie Holt has opened up about her work on the canceled DC Extended Universe movie.
Holt spoke to ComicBook.com about her scoring duties on Loki Season 2 on Disney+. At one point during the interview, the composer detailed what she had planned musically for the Leslie Grace-led DCEU movie and how legendary Batman composer Danny Elfman played a major influence in her work.
“I did sort of do a pass on the score,” Holt said. “I’d scored it all the way through, and I’d spoken to Danny Elfman, actually. I started working on it and Adil and Bilal said, ‘We’ve got Michael Keaton here. We want to use his theme from the eighties.’ I was like, ‘I’d like to just speak to Danny and see if he’d allow me to sort of work with his theme,’ because I just thought that would be the best way to do it.”
Holt continued by explaining how she met the composer of 1989’s Batman and 1992’s Batman Returns. “My agent got in touch with his agent, and we ended up chatting, and that was the first time I spoke to him. He was just so generous and pleased to be asked. And he said ‘It’s so nice that you’re asking permission and that you want to carry on this character’s theme. That feels really good.’ So, yeah, he was really excited for me to be playing around with his material. It’s very sad that it didn’t happen [and that] people didn’t get to hear it. But I’m glad I got to meet Danny Elfman.”
The story of Batgirl’s cancellation
Directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (Ms. Marvel) and written by Christina Hodson (The Flash), DC’s Batgirl starred Grace as Barbara Gordon in an origin story that would have seen her transformation into the title role with Michael Keaton’s Batman as her mentor. Additionally, the movie featured J.K. Simmons as Commissioner Gordon, Jacob Scipio as Anthony Bressi, Ivory Aquino as Alysia Yeoh, and Oscar-winner Brendan Fraser as Firefly.
Originally planned as an exclusive release for HBO Max, Warner Bros. canceled Batgirl while in post-production due to a “strategic shift as it relates to the DC universe.” The movie’s directors later revealed that the studio had deleted their footage by the time the news broke and that it would likely would never be reconsidered for a future release.
“It cannot be released in its current state,” said El Arbi. “There’s no VFX … we still had some scenes to shoot. So if one day they want us to release the Batgirl movie, they’d have to give us the means to do it. To finish it properly with our vision.”
