{"id":472688,"date":"2026-02-16T22:33:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T22:33:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/472688\/"},"modified":"2026-02-16T22:33:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T22:33:07","slug":"catwoman-wasnt-in-on-the-joke-leaving-halle-berry-in-the-lurch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/472688\/","title":{"rendered":"Catwoman wasn’t in on the joke, leaving Halle Berry in the lurch"},"content":{"rendered":"

With Women Of Action<\/a>, Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these stories say about gender and how depictions of female action heroes have evolved over time.<\/p>\n

One of my all-time favorite Saturday Night Live sketches comes from Scarlett Johansson\u2019s 2015 hosting gig, when the Marvel Cinematic Universe was at its peak but had yet to produce a female-led film. \u201cDoes Marvel not know how to make a girl superhero movie?\u201d a movie-trailer voiceover intones before cutting to an imaginary Black Widow movie<\/a> in the vein of a mid-2000s rom-com\u2014complete with Black Widow getting an internship at a fashion magazine and Thor serving as her gay best friend. It\u2019s a hilarious send-up of Hollywood\u2019s complete panic around the idea of women-led superhero movies. But it\u2019s also an almost verbatim recreation of a superhero movie that actually did come out in the mid-aughts: Halle Berry\u2019s Catwoman.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a cosmetics company, rather than a fashion magazine, where \u201cfun-deficient\u201d artist Patience Phillips (Berry) works. But beyond that, many of the details are the same as the sketch. The sassy besties endlessly invested in her romantic life? Check. The improbably giant big-city apartment? Check. The quirky klutziness? Check. The meet-cute with a hot guy who winds up on the opposite side of the law? Check and check. All the fake Black Widow trailer was missing was a sexy one-on-one basketball game and a slashed-up leather dominatrix outfit\u2014two of the most-mocked details in an incredibly mocked movie.<\/p>\n

But is there any possibility the creators behind Catwoman made a movie this ridiculous without realizing what they were doing? Is this a case of a female-led superhero movie truly not realizing how bad (and borderline offensive) it is? Or is this a case of a movie aiming for camp and missing the mark by a cat\u2019s whisker?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a question that presumably haunts Berry, who\u2014to her credit\u2014showed up to accept her Razzie Award for Worst Actress holding the Academy Award for Best Actress she\u2019d won three years earlier. Catwoman was supposed to be the movie that catapulted Berry into a new stratosphere as a blockbuster actress. Instead, it largely derailed her career into the world of mid-budget thrillers. As she put it in her genuinely hilarious Razzie speech, \u201cFirst of all, I want to thank Warner Bros. Thank you for putting me in a piece of shit, godawful movie. You know, it was just what my career needed. I was at the top and then Catwoman just plummeted me to the bottom. Love it! It\u2019s hard being on top, it\u2019s much better being on the bottom.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\ufeff<\/p>\n

Indeed, when Berry commits to a bit she really commits to it. Throughout Catwoman she deliriously rubs catnip on her face and scarfs down a can of tuna with her fingers. As Berry explained in Entertainment Weekly\u2018s oral history<\/a> of the film, \u201cThey gave me a cat early on because I didn\u2019t have one. His name was Playdough. I watched, studied, and learned how cats think. I didn\u2019t have the responsibility of children and family; I was just a woman alone with a lot of idle time to focus on this. I was full-on cat, all the time. I\u2019d crawl around my house, trying to jump on my counters, thinking, If I were a cat, how would I get up there? I was in it 24\/7.\u201d<\/p>\n

And while it\u2019s hard to say her performance is good, exactly, that level of commitment is probably better than the alternative where she just sleepwalked her way through the film. A lot of movies are bad, but few are as memorably bad as Catwoman, which also gives us Sharon Stone vamping it up as a villainous ex-model trying to sell dangerous face cream, and a scene where Patience searches \u201ccats. women\u201d to try to figure out what\u2019s going on with her new feline abilities. (She eventually stumbles onto a helpful history site with a tab for \u201cdiabolical cats.\u201d) It\u2019s impossible to put this on with a group of friends and not have fun laughing at it. That alone is its own kind of cinematic achievement.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, it doesn\u2019t seem to have been an intentional one. Catwoman is a story that unsurprisingly starts in development hell. The original idea, back in 1993, was for Tim Burton to direct Michelle Pfeiffer in a spin-off inspired by her phenomenal work in Batman Returns. When that fell apart, Warner Bros. tried to court Ashley Judd and Nicole Kidman for the role, but then shifted focus towards a lower-budget, Blade-inspired origin story that would be gritty and feminist.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As the superhero genre started to explode in the early 2000s, however, Warner Bros. shifted back to the idea of a big studio movie\u2014one that would have no explicit ties to Batman. French effects supervisor Pitof was brought onboard to direct, Berry was hired for the lead role while filming Die Another Day, and one more set of writers was brought on to rework the script. Scribes John Brancato and Michael Ferris intentionally leaned into a more comedic take on the duality between mild-mannered Patience and her feral alter ego, but studio execs soon began ordering changes and cuts, resulting in what Brancato calls \u201can oddly cobbled-together version of the script.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fact, Brancato and Ferris were hired and fired twice, after a darker rewrite from Men In Black\u2018s Ed Solomon was trashed just weeks before production began. Pitof had to scrap all his pre-production prep and fire his production designer to appease the studio. \u201cMy leverage was little,\u201d Pitof told EW. \u201cI was part of every discussion, but there were 20 people in the room. They\u2019d listen, but I didn\u2019t have what I did in France: final cut.\u201d The film was rewritten constantly during production and reshoots were still taking place up until a month before it hit theaters, all adding up to what Brancato calls \u201ca strange, out-of-control machine.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, as with so many big Hollywood projects, it\u2019s hard to say how much everyone involved is idealizing a project that was maybe never going to work, even without studio interference. While Brancato claims their original script delivered a more satirical takedown of the beauty industry, as Berry put it, \u201cI always thought the idea of Catwoman saving women from a face cream felt a bit soft. All the other superheroes save the world; they don\u2019t just save women from cracked faces.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, as silly as it sounds, it\u2019s impossible to overstate how unprecedented Catwoman was as a project. While Berry had already played Storm in the first two X-Men movies and while female-led action blockbusters like Angelina Jolie\u2019s Tomb Raider and Milla Jovovich\u2019s Resident Evil<\/a> were having a moment in the early 2000s, the list of mainstream American superhero movies starring women basically boiled down to one: 1984\u2019s Supergirl, the poorly received spin-off of the Christopher Reeve Superman universe. And though Eartha Kitt had famously played Catwoman in the 1960s, Catwoman would remain the first and only superhero movie led by a Black woman until Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rather than grapple with or even acknowledge that glass-ceiling-shattering reality, however, Warner Bros. took the \u201csoft\u201d path. Make Catwoman hot to appeal to the guys. Put her in a rom-com to appeal to the girls. Set the whole thing in the beauty industry because that\u2019s where female protagonists belong. Build the movie around the twist that it\u2019s actually an evil woman running the corrupt cosmetics company rather than a man, which is somehow both progressive and regressive at the same time. End the whole thing with a vampy \u201ccat fight.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 2000s were a frictionless, smooth-brained time for feminism and Catwoman very much fits that ethos. In some ways, that\u2019s the best thing about it\u2014there\u2019s a madness to Catwoman that you just don\u2019t get from superhero movies today, which tend to be bad in boring, formulaic ways rather than exhilaratingly off-putting ones.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At its best, Catwoman has a sense of intense comic-book styling that recalls the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies or the better moments of Joel Schumacher\u2019s Batman films. (There\u2019s an incredible scene where Berry saunters up to a bar to order a \u201cWhite Russian. No ice. Hold the vodka. Hold the Kahl\u00faa.\u201d) But, at some point, the whole thing just collapses under the weight of its terrible CGI and hackneyed plotting. A movie that\u2019s truly in on the joke would have been able to sustain its ridiculousness to the end, as Batman & Robin does. But Catwoman makes the fatal flaw of trying to become at least a little bit serious about what it means to \u201cdie and be reborn\u201d and \u201cexperience a freedom other women will never know\u201d as a catwoman. This is its ultimate undoing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Catwoman has found its following as a cult classic over the past 22 years, its status as an infamous flop still outweighs any ironic reclamation, particularly for Berry. \u201cI hated that it got all put on me, and I hate that, to this day, it\u2019s my failure,\u201d she told EW in 2024. \u201cI felt like it was Halle Berry\u2019s failure, but I didn\u2019t make it alone.\u201d Thankfully, in the years since Catwoman\u2018s release, she\u2019s proven to be an effective action heroine elsewhere\u2014both in smaller thrillers like Kidnap<\/a> and in bigger projects like John Wick: Chapter 3\u2014Parabellum<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Catwoman herself has recovered too, first in the hands of Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises and then Zo\u00eb Kravitz in The Batman. However, no one has yet been bold enough to return to the idea of a solo Catwoman flick. Maybe that\u2019s the most telling lesson Catwoman has to teach us: When Batman or Superman or The Fantastic Four star in a movie that stinks, Hollywood just recasts the roles and makes another one. But when women superheroes fail, they don\u2019t usually get a second chance. Once Jennifer Garner\u2019s Elektra bombed the year after Catwoman, Hollywood put a kibosh on female-led superhero movies for over a decade, until Wonder Woman<\/a> took a swing 12 years later.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

So far, at least, James Gunn\u2019s rebooted DC Universe doesn\u2019t seem to have any plans to change that fate for its feline heroine. Catwoman may be one of the most iconic female characters in the entire comic book canon\u2014and her story feels ripe for a lower-budget, thematically rich retelling\u2014but unlike her male counterparts, she doesn\u2019t get nine onscreen lives.<\/p>\n

Next time: Zack Snyder\u2019s Sucker Punch turns 15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With Women Of Action, Caroline Siede digs into the history of women-driven action movies to explore what these…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":472689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-472688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472688","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/472689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}