The Big Picture
Catwoman was a major career setback for Halle Berry, who was at the peak of her success after winning an Oscar for Monster’s Ball. The film received scathing reviews and Berry was widely mocked for her involvement, but she has since embraced it as a learning experience. Despite the negative impact on her career, Berry has found silver linings, including meeting interesting people, learning martial arts, and making a substantial amount of money.
Catwoman needs no introduction. Its reputation as one of the worst films ever made was established practically from day one, and its dismal performance at the global box office ($82 million from a $100 million budget) killed any chances of it becoming the next big franchise. It didn’t help that it released the same summer as the widely acclaimed Spider-Man 2, putting the folks at Warner Bros. and DC Comics in a rather unenviable position. Seven months later, at the same time its competitor was winning an Academy Award, Catwoman was collecting the statuettes for Worst Picture and Worst Director at the Golden Raspberry Awards – the perfect encapsulation of the whole ordeal. For a project that had started life with such promise (as a Batman Returns spin-off with Michelle Pfeiffer in the lead role and Tim Burton in the directing chair), the result had been nothing short of a disaster. Such high-profile failures change the lives of everyone involved, but in the case of Catwoman, none were affected more than the person at the heart of this grim saga, Halle Berry.
In hindsight, Catwoman couldn’t have been released at a worse time. The previous few years had been a phenomenal time for Halle Berry, with the actor still glowing from her 2002 win for Best Actress at the Academy Awards for the controversial (but highly praised) Monster’s Ball. This, combined with lauded roles in a variety of projects, had transformed Berry into one of the most recognizable and highest-paid actors of the decade – something that Catwoman almost singlehandedly destroyed. The dismal response to the film made Berry an instant subject of mockery, and while she did confront its shortcomings with dignity, the claws of this cat left permanent marks. In subsequent years, Berry has openly discussed the repercussions that came from starring in Catwoman, although not in the wholly negative terms you’d expect. It’s likely that most people involved with the film would happily forget that it ever happened, but to Berry, it was a learning experience that ultimately changed her life for the better.
Why Was the Early 2000s an Amazing Time for Halle Berry?
Image via 20th Century Studios
To understand the extent of Catwoman’s impact on Berry, it’s vital to understand where her career was during this period of her life. To put it bluntly, she was doing pretty darn well. A small role in Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever had spawned a healthy selection of roles in film and television across the 1990s, all topped off by her Primetime Emmy and Golden Globe-winning performance in the 1999 biopic Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. Soon after, she was appearing in one of the highest-grossing films of 2000, X-Men (a film that would quickly be regarded as one of the most influence of the century), and dominating headlines around the world after rumors that she had been paid $500,000 for a gratuitous nude scene in the film Swordfish. In what felt like a blink of an eye, Berry had become one of the biggest stars on the planet – a feeling that was confirmed when she became the first (and, to date, only) Black woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. An incredible turnaround for someone who had started their career living in a homeless shelter in New York City.
But despite the seemingly limitless opportunities that come from winning an Oscar, it also sets an impossibly high bar for future projects. The temptation for actors to accept every role that’s suddenly rushing in their direction without considering if said roles are even worthy of their skills – resulting in a string of poorly received films that have the potential to cause serious harm to their image – is well-documented, with IndieWire once dubbing this phenomenon (appropriately enough) “The Halle Berry Effect”. That might seem overly harsh, but a glance through her immediate roles following Monster’s Ball makes it easier to see where they were coming from. For instance, her appearance as NSA agent Jinx in Die Another Day did raise her profile considerably, but the film’s outlandish tone and overall mixed reaction (which has only grown worse ever since) was ill-suited to an actor of her caliber. Her return to dramatic roles in films like Gothika and Perfect Stranger (both critical and commercial failures) didn’t restore confidence, leaving her with an increasingly middling filmography. Berry was still a household name by the close of the decade, but her standing within the industry was undeniably weakened.
The Backlash Against ‘Catwoman’ Was Instantaneous
Image via Warner Bros.
Of everything Halle Berry appeared in following her Oscar victory, none disrupted her career more than Catwoman. Reviews were dire, with famed critic Roger Ebert suggesting that its director, Pitof, “[who] was probably issued with two names at birth…would be wise to use the other one on his next project”. Another critic framed their whole review as though it was a letter from the Academy demanding that Berry return her Oscar due to her “wanton, reckless, and repeated dramatic incompetence”. Other reviews continued in this race to be the most scathing, and while some did highlight Berry as the film’s sole ray of light, this did nothing to mitigate the damage to her reputation. Before long she was collecting the Razzie for Worst Actress in person and delivering a speech that parodied the one she’d previously given at the Oscars. It was a moment of rare humility in a profession that is so often dominated by egotism, and while it helped to restore her image in the eyes of general moviegoers, it’s doubtful that Hollywood executives were of a similar opinion.
Halle Berry has still enjoyed a healthy career in the years since Catwoman’s release, but it’s clear that its shadow is an ever-present annoyance in her life. In an interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live! in 2021, Berry described the burden of Catwoman as such: “I didn’t direct it, I didn’t produce it, nor did I write it. I was just the actress in it. But for all these years, I have carried the weight of that film. And whatever success it had or didn’t have somehow seemed like it was all my fault.” It’s sad that Berry would be forced to take the blame for something that largely wasn’t her fault, although her status within Hollywood at the time meant that ridicule was inevitable. Such amplified commentary is common for recent Oscar winners – Brie Larson provoked a similar reaction when she followed up her Best Actress award for Room with a leading role in Kong: Skull Island – and while Berry should have known better than to agree to the film in the first place (she only did so because a proposed Die Another Day spin-off focused on Jinx was axed), there are others far more worthy of incrimination. Sadly, the damage had been done.
RELATED: Jake Gyllenhaal Nearly Played Christopher Nolan’s Batman
How Have Halle Berry’s Views on ‘Catwoman’ Changed?
Image via Warner Bros.
But in a plot twist that even M. Night Shyamalan couldn’t have imagined, the tale of Catwoman ends on a positive note. Despite throwing a few light-hearted jabs in the film’s direction whenever the topic crops up, Berry has made sure to emphasize all the ways that it benefitted her life. After collecting an award from the New York Women in Communication organization in 2018, Berry had this to say on the subject: “While it failed to most people, it wasn’t a failure for me because I met so many interesting people that I wouldn’t have met otherwise, I learned two forms of martial arts and I learned not what to do.” She jokingly followed this up by thanking the film for making her “a shit-load of money that changed my life” (a whopping $14 million) before closing on a sincere lesson about embracing and then learning from your mistakes to better yourself for the future. Elsewhere, Berry has praised the film for making her feel empowered after learning that her then-partner, singer Eric Benét, had been unfaithful. “Putting on that suit made it a whole lot easier” – an interesting revelation that might lead some people to reassess the whole endeavor.
It’s impossible to know what Halle Berry’s initial reaction to Catwoman was, but one can’t imagine it was anything good. Watching your career plummet from its highest high to its lowest low in such a minuscule window of time would be embarrassing for anyone, but Berry deserves immense credit for accepting rather than denying this new reality. It takes a lot of courage to weather a storm that would sink most personalities, and her comments about the film benefiting both her personal and professional life reveal a perspective that the majority of her critics would never have considered (in addition to providing hope to other actors facing a similar ordeal). Catwoman may have put a damper on things, but it was far from the career-ender it had the potential to be. Besides, Berry has even offered to direct the next Catwoman film on the off-chance Warner Bros. decides to flip that coin once again. If there was any bad blood between her and this particular project, it’s long gone.