Leslie Grace believes in a potential sequel for the Batgirl film we’ll never see

Will we ever stop talking about Batgirl? It’s been months now since the DC film was shockingly shelved, and the film has become an infamous subject of debate and confusion. The suits have stood by their decision to take the tax write-off, leading fans to think the movie was Just That Bad. Those on the creative side would understandably beg to differ. “I’m not going to lie to you. In every film, there are obstacles, and our film was nothing short of that,” star Leslie Grace told Variety. “But the film that I got to see—the scenes that were there—was incredible.”

The version Grace saw was from “the beginning of the editing process” and completely unfinished, but “There was definitely potential for a good film, in my opinion,” she says. In fact, she and directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah “still are” in discussions about a potential sequel to that story. “We were so excited about all the ideas that we had, because you can see long-term potential in the story that we were beginning to build.”

“We’ve definitely had conversations about Batgirl’s future and how Batgirl can make a resurgence. I think fans are looking forward to seeing that,” Grace adds when asked about possibly joining Matt Reeves’ version of the Batfamily. “We’ll just see where that takes us; I can’t say one way or the other if that is a reality at this point. I can’t speak too much about a future for Batgirl or guarantee anything. The last thing that I would want to do is give folks any kind of inkling of something that I have not much control over—as we’ve learned.”

Grace’s co-star Brendan Fraser, for one, would like to see her return as the character, particularly for “a whole generation of little girls are going to have to wait longer to see a Batgirl and say, ‘Hey, she looks like me.’” He describes the discovery that the company wasn’t going to invest more in making the film a theatrical release as a “gut punch,” recalling, “[Then] we learned that it was in the interest of writing down some debt? That part really stung.”

New DC boss Peter Safran, whose hiring came after the Batgirl fiasco, nevertheless defended the decision, saying the movie was “unreleasable” and in fact claims it would have hurt the DC brand and “those people involved.” The DC brass who talked Grace down didn’t phrase it as such: “They weren’t really specific on anything creative in terms of what they felt about the film and how it would’ve hurt DC creatively,” she shares. (She herself hasn’t heard from Safran or his DC Studios co-head James Gunn. Maybe she should try tweeting him?)

She’s diplomatic about Safran’s take, “But I’m a human being, and people have perceptions and people read things,” she says. “And when words are expressed very lightly about work that people really dedicated a lot of time to—not just myself but the whole crew—I can understand how it could be frustrating.”