'Batgirl' Movie Back On, Now With 'Bumblebee' Writer

Christina Hodson will now write the script that was previously being worked on by Joss Whedon.

Warner Bros. is lighting up the Bat-signal for Batgirl once again.

Two months after Joss Whedon left the Batgirl movie project, the studio is moving ahead on developing a new film project based on the DC Entertainment heroine.

Christina Hodson, who wrote the upcoming Transformers spinoff Bumblebee, has been tapped to pen a new script featuring Barbra Gordon, the daughter of Gotham City police commissioner James Gordon.

Barbra Gordon is the most established version of the character, who was initially introduced in 1961 as Betty Kane. But the character was revamped in 1967 when television executives wanted to attract a female audience to the Batman TV series, then faltering in its third season. Yvonne Craig played the character whose last live-action big-screen appearance was with Alicia Silverstone in Joel Schumacher's 1997 movie Batman & Robin (the character makes a CG cameo in Ready Player One).

Whedon came on to the Batgirl project with great fanfare last year. Fans were excited that the female empowerment icon, second only to Wonder Woman in the DC stable, would be in the hands of the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But by February of this year, Whedon, by his own account, had failed to come up with a story.

Hodson wrote the 2017 Warner Bros. thriller Unforgettable, which starred Rosario Dawson and Katherine Heigl, and has been a player in a couple of writers rooms, for Transformers (which led to her nabbing the Bumblebee gig) and Ology, the franchise Paramount is developing based on the YA fictional encyclopedias from Templar Publishing

Hodson has already written the Batgirl character, having helped to develop a feature project based on the all-female crime-fighting group Birds of Prey.

Hodson is repped by CAA and Kaplan/Perrone Entertainment.