Batgirl Movie Gains One Of The Best Players From Gladiator And Logan
One of the people who made Gladiator and Logan incredible films has just been recruited for the upcoming Batgirl movie!
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If a movie doesn’t look good, then it doesn’t look right. For the upcoming Batgirl movie, the co-directing team of Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah is making sure their Gotham City story looks the best it can by hiring an acclaimed director of photography. Batgirl just landed John Mathieson — who was the director of photography on both 2000’s Gladiator and 2017’s Logan — as its cinematographer.
Adil El Arbi announced Mathieson’s involvement in the project in an Instagram story, a screenshot of which was later shared by the Twitter fan account Batgirl Film News. El Arbi shared a photo which included Gladiator‘s lead Russell Crowe and its director Ridley Scott. The Batgirl movie co-director wrote that it was a “throwback” shot from 2016, adding how “crazy” it was that now Gladiator‘s cinematographer is working with him on Batgirl. You can see the tweet from Batgirl Film News below.
While he has yet to take one of the coveted trophies home, John Mathieson has been nominated for Oscars twice — first in 2000 for Gladiator, and again five years later for Joel Schumacher’s Phantom of the Opera. The Batgirl movie won’t be Mathieson’s first time working in the superhero genre either. Along with Logan, he worked on 2011’s X-Men: First Class and is the director of photography for next year’s Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.
Mathieson won’t be alone in going from a big Marvel Cinematic Universe project to the Batgirl movie. In September Natalie Holt — who joined the superhero genre this year by composing the music for Disney+’s Loki — announced she had been tapped to compose the score for Batgirl. While didn’t earn an Emmy nomination for Loki, she was up for an Emmy in 2016 for the score of the British historical drama Victoria.
There’s been a slow, but steady stream of news for both the cast and the crew of the upcoming Batgirl movie ever since Leslie Grace landed the lead role of Barbara Gordon and her alter ego in July. Two months after she was cast, the In the Heights star told a touching story of how she learned she would be Batgirl. Grace was one of the three finalists for the role — along with Isabella Merced (Transformers: The Last Knight) and Zoey Deutch (Zombieland: Double Tap) — and the directors contacted her one day for what they said was a final reading via Zoom. When Grace logged in, however, she found herself facing a room full of Warner Bros. executives, and then her phone dinged with an email notification. The message within said simply “I am Batgirl.”
More recently, Brendan Fraser was announced as one of the Batgirl movie’s villains. While his role hasn’t been officially named, the prevailing theory is that he’ll play the pyromaniac villain Firefly. There’s another, lesser-known theory however that Fraser is playing a more “organized” villain, as in organized crime. Hollywood Reporter writer Borys Kit claims an inside source told him that Fraser will actually be playing Gotham gangster Carmine Falcone — who Tom Wilkinson played in 2005’s Batman Begins. Kit also said El Arbi and Fallah first tried to net Sylvester Stallone for the role, and turned to Fraser only when Rocky didn’t work out.
We’ll know more when the Batgirl movie releases on HBO Max, though we don’t know when that will be yet. J.K. Simmons will be reprising the role of Batgirl’s father James Gordon, who he first played in 2017’s Justice League. Jacob Scipio (Bad Boys for Life) has also been cast in an undisclosed role.
