Brendan Fraser Torches Batgirl Cancellation, Says The Film Was Worth More Burned Than Released

Brendan Fraser is not in a hurry to play nice about how Hollywood is running itself right now. In a new AP interview, he vents about Batgirl getting scrapped, why studios are treating finished movies like balance-sheet kindling, and where he stands as he pivots into a Japan-set drama called Rental Family. It is blunt, a little bleak, and yes, oddly charming in spots. Hedgehogs are involved.

On Batgirl and the studio math that makes no sense to anyone who loves movies

Fraser says Batgirl wasn't some half-baked experiment. It was a full production, spread across four floors in Glasgow. He was so into it he kept sneaking into the art department to nerd out over the work. Then the whole thing got shelved, and he is still not over the logic behind that decision.

"The product, I'm sorry, 'content,' is being commodified to the extent that it's more valuable to burn it down and get the insurance on it than to give it a shot in the marketplace."

He also points out the human side of that call. Batgirl wasn't just a title, it was a superhero movie with a heroine who could have meant the world to a lot of young viewers. When you spike a film like that, you are not just saving on marketing costs, you are taking away a chance for kids to see a hero who looks like them.

Zooming out, Fraser worries the business is sidelining storytelling in favor of financial engineering. His phrasing in the interview is a bit tangled, but the gist is clear: keep prioritizing spreadsheets over stories and the industry is going to wound itself. He ties that anxiety to the bigger mess everyone is dealing with right now, from shifting business models to the muddle around AI. In his words, the whole field feels like hacking through tall grass, and it could use a serious shot of energy to steady itself.

What he is doing next: Rental Family in Japan

After winning the Oscar for The Whale, Fraser didn't immediately bolt into a parade of obvious awards-bait offers. He says he was kind of floating for a bit, without an agent, when Rental Family came along. The premise: he plays a washed-up actor hired to play roles inside other people's lives, filling in as faux family on demand. He describes choosing the project like picking the scrappy shelter dog no one else notices - the one with bad teeth and a twitchy eye - because it has heart.

Fraser also has a practical view of what he does for a living. To him, acting is straight-up a service job: you provide the performance, you get paid, there are rules and boundaries. And while shooting in Tokyo, he embraced the local quirks in the most Fraser way possible. He hit a few animal cafes and, yes, rented a hedgehog. They hand you gardening gloves and tickets for two vending-machine drinks, then you sit and handle these tiny prickly guys like that is the most normal thing in the world.

So, big picture: he is calling out the trend of torching finished work for short-term financial wins, warning that audiences lose when that happens, and then quietly choosing an offbeat, human-scale drama to do the opposite. If the industry really does need a B-12 shot, maybe it starts with letting movies live.