Margot Robbie just revealed that her Birds of Prey movie was supposed to feature an iconic Batman villain until a certain creator took it away!
The new landscape of the DC Universe in the movies is a lot different from what it was supposed to be just five years ago. The collapse of the “Snyderverse” and the various other takes have been well documented and are not worth going into now. Still, many will agree that a highlight of it all was Margot Robbie’s performance as Harley Quinn.
The actress debuted as the Joker’s insane love interest in 2016’s Suicide Squad and was the best part of the film. Robbie then took center stage in 2020’s Birds of Prey, a spin-off film where Harley runs afoul of the twisted mobster Black Mask (Ewan McGregor). She’s forced to team up with Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett), the Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Renee Montoya (Rosie Perez).
The movie was one of the last blockbusters before the COVID-19 pandemic, grossing a disappointing $200 million. Robbie would return as Harley in 2022’s The Suicide Squad, written and directed by James Gunn, who now runs the DC movie division.
The movie got decent reviews, although some criticism about Black Mask as the villain. As it happens, he wasn’t supposed to be in the film as the role of the villain was intended to be a classic Batman foe!
The Penguin was removed from Birds of Prey
In a dual interview with Entertainment Weekly to promote their new movie A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, Robbie and Colin Farrell talked about their mutual work playing DC Comics villains, as Ferrell, of course, played Oz Cobblepot aka the Penguin in 2022’s The Batman and then his own solo HBO series.
The pair realized they’d never talked about that connection, which struck them as weird. Farrell started to bring up that it made sense, as it’s established how The Batman films exist in a separate reality from the DCEU movies.
At which point, Robbie dropped the bomb on Farrell that "The first draft that Christina [Hodson] wrote of Birds of Prey, the villain was the Penguin.” As Farrell expressed shock at that, Robbie added, “And then [director/writer] Matt Reeves said, 'Don't use the Penguin. I'm going to use him in my thing. And so we swapped it to Black Mask."
When asked what Hodson’s take on the Penguin would have been, Robbie said it was “amazing” and offered Farrell a chance to read the original script, which she’d saved. It was known that Birds of Prey went through a few rewrites, but the revelation of the Penguin being taken out by Reeves is new.
It would have been interesting to use the Penguin as he’d fit the mobster role of the film. Then again, Black Mask is the rare Batman villain that works as well in the comic books as in a real-life setting. He also made a disposable foe to kill off in the end and McGregor’s performance was good.
It’s well known that Reeves always liked the Penguin and obviously felt that having him show up in Birds would weaken his presence in his Batman movie. It’s possible Hodson’s version was more in line with the classic comic book Penguin with his trick umbrellas rather than the rough criminal Reeves presented.
There’s no word yet on whether Robbie would reprise the role of Harley in the new DC movies, although there are hopes she can do so. If nothing else, it’s fun to imagine how the Penguin nearly graced the big screens a couple of years earlier and would have made for a wilder adventure for Harley and the Birds.
Birds of Prey and The Penguin streaming on HBO Max.