Posted in: Movies | Tagged: batgirl, Batman, batman v superman, ben affleck, Gotham City Sirens, joss whedon, warner bros oracle

Batgirl In The DCEU: Hints We've Already Seen About Barbara Gordon / Oracle, And What It Might Mean For Nightwing And Gotham City Sirens

With word breaking earlier today that Warner Bros will be making a Batgirl movie written and directed by Joss Whedon, several questions quickly came to mind, including: Which Batgirl would it be?  EW has just been told that:

this version will be Barbara Gordon, daughter of Commissioner Gordon, and the movie will use the DC Comics "New 52" version of the character as a starting point.

In that timeline, launched in 2011, Barbara Gordon has recovered from a paralyzing spinal injury notoriously inflicted on her by the Joker in the 1988 graphic novel The Killing Joke. In the earlier books, that damage confined her to a wheelchair and ended her flying, swinging, punching career as Batgirl — but she continued to fight the good fight under the name Oracle as a super-hacker.

This does fit with a few clues that we've already seen in Batman v Superman — and elsewhere.  First, we have this screencap from Reddit, showing "Oracle Network" on Bruce Wayne's computer system.

Not much by itself, but that's fleshed out a bit in The Gotham And Metropolis Time Out Travel Guide (which is turning into a nifty cache of DCEU Easter Eggs), which has a listing for The Clock Tower — which is of course Oracle's HQ:

That's another nice tidbit, although it still doesn't tell us too much — except that if this theory fits, it soon won't be open by appointment.  But then there's also this: last month, Gotham City Sirens director David Ayer tweeted a pic of Black Mask, which was widely interpreted as meaning that the character would be the villain of the film.  Of course… Black Mask also has some major history with Oracle, both centered around the destruction of the Clock Tower and otherwise, and since we're going there — Nightwing has history with Black Mask too.  Obviously, we're mixing New 52 and pre-New 52 influences here, but given what we've seen of the DCEU so far, they'd pretty much have to be.

Which is still a lot more smoke than fire, except for one final thing: One very early rumor about the script for Ben Affleck's The Batman, went like this:

Having also laid out DC's "phase 2" plans, the anonymous poster has also said that The Joker and Black Mask will be the major big bads in the solo film. On top of that, Dick Grayson and Barbara Gordon will also appear (hopefully meaning we'll see Nightwing and Oracle).

That doesn't sound like the exact form of what's shaping up now, but it sure does seem to include most of the elements that they are putting together here.  During Affleck's well-publicized on-again, off-again departure from scriptwriting duties for The Batman, one quote he dropped that may fit in this context was:  "I'm a real believer in not reverse-engineering projects to meet a window or a date, but rather when you get the right story, or the right idea, or you get the right thing, then you make the movie."

That quote — particularly the 'reverse engineer' part — could be interpreted as Affleck's frustration at having to script to a target that included several important external parameters that were part of the bigger picture of the DCEU Gotham films.  This is just a theory, of course, but it's been pretty clear over the past few months that Warner Bros wants the same sort of cohesive cinematic universe that Marvel has, and it's starting to look like it might already be planned down to some very specific details.

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