The encyclopedia · Product & Design · Product decision · 2004
Warner Bros. spent $100M detaching Catwoman from Batman canon and it bombed
The spinoff dropped the character's Batman ties for an original story, made $82M against a $100M budget, and won Halle Berry a Razzie.
Warner Bros. · 2004-07-23
What happened
Warner Bros. greenlit a Catwoman film built around Halle Berry, fresh off her Oscar win, deliberately severing the character from Batman's mythology and Gotham City to build a standalone franchise instead, on a production budget around $100 million.
The finished film replaced the established comic-book character with an original story about a murdered graphic designer resurrected with cat-like powers, discarding decades of established backstory that fans and critics expected the adaptation to draw on.
Catwoman opened to scathing reviews and grossed about $82 million worldwide, well short of its budget once marketing is factored in. It received seven Golden Raspberry nominations and won Worst Picture, Worst Director and Worst Actress, with Berry accepting her Razzie in person.
Why it happened
- The studio approved cutting the character's core comic-book identity without testing whether audiences would accept the replacement.
- A star's box-office draw was treated as sufficient to carry a film disconnected from the source material fans wanted.
- Nobody course-corrected the script during production despite it departing so far from the character's established appeal.
- The budget assumed a built-in audience that an original story detached from the IP had no real claim to.
The lesson
An IP's box-office draw comes from what made people love it — cutting that and keeping only the name doesn't transfer the value.
Aftermath
Catwoman became a standard reference point for studios on the risk of stripping a comic-book character's established identity, and no further live-action Catwoman spinoff was attempted for nearly two decades.
Sources
- Catwoman (film) — Wikipedia
- Inverse — The Oral History Of 'Catwoman,' Halle Berry's Superhero Movie Disaster
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