When it comes to naming the worst comic book movies ever made, Halle Berry’s disastrous Catwoman fully deserves to be part of the conversation every time, something the actress has happily admitted herself on countless occasions in the seventeen years since it was released.
Berry was one of the hottest talents in the business coming off an Academy Award win for Best Actress in Monster’s Ball, and then proceeded to come perilously close to torpedoing her entire career by headlining Pitof’s ill-conceived blockbuster. Catwoman was savaged by critics and tanked at the box office, failing to even come close to recouping the hefty $100 million budget.
The one-two punch of Catwoman and Elektra both bombing put Hollywood’s major studios off the idea of female-led superhero movies for over a decade, and even though it lost Warner Bros. a lot of money, Berry’s sole outing as Patience Phillips remained the highest-grossing comic book adaptation with a woman in the lead role until Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman was released in 2017.
The star even accepted her Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress in person, thanking her agent for getting her cast in such a piece of sh*t. However, in a new interview the 54 year-old revealed that she doesn’t regret her decision at all, and it’s all down to the paycheck she received for her efforts.
It was one of the biggest paydays of my whole life, which, there’s nothing wrong with that. I don’t want to feel like ‘Oh, I can only do award-worthy stuff’. What is an award-worthy performance?”
Berry was rewarded with a $14 million payday for taking top billing in a terrible film where one of the world’s most enduringly popular superheroes battles an evil moisturizer, so the financial compensation clearly softened the blow of a project she’ll more than likely never be able to live down, given Catwoman‘s infamous standing in the genre.
