Not even Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr., or Michael Keaton returning as Batman could save these.

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The whole thing only got weirder after the cancellation. Directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah said they tried to access footage from the movie afterward and couldn’t. According to them, Warner Bros. had blocked them from the servers. 

The cast, understandably, was not thrilled. Brendan Fraser later called the cancellation tragic, especially because of what Leslie Grace’s Batgirl could have meant to young girls. Michael Keaton had a more darkly funny reaction, essentially saying he didn’t lose sleep over it because he got paid, though he felt bad for the directors. 

And mere months before the shocking news, Grace (Batgirl herself) was talking up the movie and revealed she and the directors were even discussing sequel ideas. "There’s crazy stunts, crazy drops. She’s a biker chick, so you’re going to see her do a bunch of badassery." She added, "There were a lot of night shoots. There were a lot of long days, but it was so worth it." Uh... 

Warner Bros. later insisted the cancellation had nothing to do with Grace’s performance, and DC Studios co-head Peter Safran eventually said the film was “not releasable” and “built for the small screen.” Maybe that’s true. Maybe it wasn’t good. But plenty of bad superhero movies have been released.

Fox Atomic topper Peter Rice said at the time, “Everybody worked very hard on Revenge of the Nerds, and we’re all extremely disappointed that we can’t move forward.”

In 2020, Variety reported that Seth MacFarlane and the Lucas Brothers were developing another Revenge of the Nerds reboot for 20th Century Studios, but it has yet to go into production.

Netflix’s chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, said of the decision, “If you think about how many things we make, it’s a rare thing. But it was one where there were lots of production issues, creative issues, and everybody on both sides, the talent and us, just agreed that it was better to not watch it.”

Despite the fiasco, Halle Berry also remained in business with Netflix, later starring opposite Mark Wahlberg in 2024's The Union.

Foxx has suggested the comedy climate is part of the problem. In 2022, while discussing the unreleased film, he said, "Man, it's been tough, with the lay of the land when it comes to comedy, man. We're trying to break open those sensitive corners where people go back to laughing again." He also said test audiences laughed a lot and that the movie was “definitely going for it.” 

The film company sued Wood, who pushed back with her lawyers, but it appears the litigation fizzled out. The film remains unfinished.

A 2009 documentary, Ballybrando, revisited the debacle, and in 2025, the Irish Examiner reported that producer Barry Navidi still wanted to resurrect the project 30 years later — not with Brando, obviously, but as a new version of the story.

But because Warner Bros. Discovery reportedly took a tax write-off on the film, the company can’t simply turn around and monetize it without losing that tax benefit. Kurinsky explained that there was basically “no scenario” where they could sell it, stream it, or release it, because any of those moves would make money from the thing they had written off.

The movie has since become a cult object through bootlegs, clips, and the documentary Doomed! The Untold Story of Roger Corman’s The Fantastic Four. 

According to Variety, about $20 million had already been spent, but the people involved ultimately decided the film was not working. Pharrell and Gondry said in a statement, “When all of us got into the editing room we collectively decided there wasn’t a path forward to tell the version of this story that we originally envisioned.” (Translation: “We looked at the footage and decided nobody should ever see this.”)

Universal reportedly absorbed the cost, and the film was not expected to be finished or shopped to another studio. So somewhere out there, there is footage of a Michel Gondry-directed Pharrell musical...and most likely we'll never see a frame of it.

Miller served jail time and probation; in 2025, his conviction was erased under Georgia’s First Offender Act after he completed probation, and he is legally allowed to direct again. That legal development, however, obviously did not change what happened on that bridge.

That's when the film's director George Sluizer walked into the storage facility and, uh, liberated the negative. Years later, he cut together a version of the film, using his own narration to explain the missing scenes. There was speculation that Joaquin Phoenix might dub or narrate parts of River’s role, but the Phoenix family made it clear they wanted nothing to do with the release. A representative said the family would “absolutely” not participate.

The sort-of finished film played at some festivals, but since the insurance company still owned the film, it made showing the film elsewhere legally difficult. In the end, twenty years after filming, this version received a limited VOD release.

Before dying at 91 in 2017, Lewis donated an incomplete copy to the Library of Congress in 2015 with the condition that it not be screened before 2024. Once it became available to the public, a New Republic writer viewed hours of Library of Congress material and concluded that a finished version doesn’t really exist there — it's more like fragments, repeated takes, behind-the-scenes footage, and incomplete material. 

Also in 2024, the documentary From Darkness to Light premiered at Venice and included footage from the film, along with interviews about the disastrous production. Critics noted that the documentary finally allowed viewers to see extended segments of the movie rather than just hear decades of jokes about it.

Will Forte also went public after seeing it, writing, "When I first heard that our movie was getting ‘deleted,’ I hadn’t seen it yet. So I was thinking what everyone else must have been thinking: this thing must be a hunk of junk. But then I saw it. And it’s incredible. Super funny throughout, visually stunning, sweet, sincere, and emotionally resonant in a very earned way. As the credits rolled, I just sat there thinking how lucky I was to be a part of something so special. That quickly turned to confusion and frustration. This was the movie they’re not going to release?"

For a while, though, it really looked like the Wile E. Coyote movie had an anvil dropped on its head for good. But Warner Bros. reportedly shopped the movie around, and in 2025, the anvil finally missed. Ketchup Entertainment acquired worldwide distribution rights to the movie, with reports putting the deal around $50 million and a theatrical release planned for 2026. Ketchup’s CEO said the film was “a perfect blend of nostalgia and modern storytelling."