‘No one movie is judged for having to speak for all men’: The director of a new thriller dismisses comparisons to Netflix’s erotic #1 hit

Being compared to a high-profile erotic thriller that cost Netflix $20 million to acquire before becoming the number one most-watched movie on the entire streaming service doesn’t necessarily sound like a bad thing on paper, but Cat Person director Susanna Fogel doesn’t see the similarities.

In her defense, there isn’t much direct DNA between the two other than a strong focus on the complex dynamics between men and women in personal and professional settings, but it would appear that lines are being drawn regardless after the filmmaker addressed the apparent connections between her movie and Fair Play in an interview with The Wrap.

“We’re overdue to have these stories. We’re overdue to have many of them. No one movie is judged for having to speak for all men. There’s this desire to put so much pressure on the minority storyteller to represent a thing for everybody.”

Fair Play finds Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor’s relationship fracturing at the seams when their personal and professional lives intertwine in the cutthroat financial world, whereas Cat Person sees CODA breakout Emilia Jones and Succession scene-stealer Nicholas Braun embark on a fledgling relationship with the potential to get real ugly real quick.

The downside is that the former has fared significantly better among critics than the latter, with Netflix’s smash hit holding an 88 percent Rotten Tomatoes score compared to Cat Person‘s rather more muted 45 percent, but it’s easy to see why Fogel has made a point of questioning why two disparate titles with vaguely shared strands of thematic DNA need to be lumped into the same conversation.