Posted By Dan Greenfield on Apr 19, 2025 | 4 comments

CATWOMAN WEEK Meets REEL RETRO CINEMA…

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Welcome to CATWOMAN WEEK! One of the greatest characters in comics history debuted 85 years ago, in Batman #1, on April 24, 1940 — and we’re celebrating with a series of features saluting the Feline Fatale. Beginning Sunday, it’ll be JOKER WEEK! For the complete index of CATWOMAN WEEK features, click here.

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By ROB KELLY

Starting with Batman ’66, any time the Caped Crusader made the leap from the comic-book pages into another form — film, television, animation, or even toys — it didn’t take long for his rogues gallery to start showing up. And you could argue that other than the Joker, there is no more famous member of that nefarious crew than Catwoman. So it seems only fitting that Selina Kyle made a leap of her own into headlining her own film, Catwoman, in 2004, before any of those other clowns!

The ball of yarn started rolling in 1992, after Michelle Pfeiffer’s scene-stealing turn as Catwoman in Batman Returns. Whatever criticisms people had of that film, virtually everyone was in agreement that Pfeiffer was phenomenal in the role: sexy, funny, and delightfully unhinged. Warner Bros. knew how good she was even before the movie was released, and at the last minute they asked director Tim Burton to insert a shot of Catwoman at the very end of the film, reassuring audiences that the character was, in fact, still alive and ready for more adventures.

Pfeiffer let it be known that she would be up for a solo Catwoman feature, if it meant she could reteam with Burton. But the project got stuck in what is known as “Development Hell” — Burton left the Batman franchise, an initial script by Daniel Waters no longer lined up with the more family-friendly tone the studio was going for with Batman Forever, and Pfeiffer’s priorities moved on to motherhood. But the project never completely died, so when Warner Bros. cancelled a planned Batman vs. Superman film, they moved Catwoman to the front burner.

By that point, Halle Berry had become a movie star, and a proposed James Bond spinoff of her character from Die Another Day, Jinx, had just been cancelled. So she was in the market to headline a big budget potential franchise. During this time the Batman movies were in one of their fallow periods, so the decision was made not to connect Catwoman to that world: no Batman, no Gotham City; this Catwoman wouldn’t even be Selina Kyle.

While creatively that choice makes a lot of sense, I think with the benefit of hindsight we can see that was one of the things that doomed Catwoman from the start: to die-hard comics fans like myself, the film reeked of a project that got away from DC Comics, and was “Catwoman” in name only. So when the film finally arrived in July 2004, I skipped it entirely, and in the intervening decades was not remotely interested in seeing it.

Of course, we live in a very different franchise landscape than we did then: Not only are there multiple iterations of Batman, Superman, the Flash, etc., available all at the same time now, but audiences have now been primed to accept the idea that even villains like the Joker can headline their own films, with only tangential connections to the comic book worlds from which they were spawned. So while I don’t think it can be argued that Catwoman is a very good film, I do think it might have been produced and received a lot differently had it arrived in 2024 instead of 2004.

Berry plays Patience Phillips, a mousy (heh) graphic designer who works for a cosmetics company run by the husband and wife team of George and Laurel Hedare (Lambert Wilson and Sharon Stone). The company is preparing to launch a new skin cream that it claims can reduce, even reverse, the effects of aging. George, in particular, is a nasty piece of work, and he brutally criticizes Patience’s illustrations for the new product and demands she re-do all of it, immediately. Patience is forced to work all night, so to make the deadline she brings her work to the company’s R&D lab. She overhears that the new skin cream has dangerous side effects, something Laurel casually dismisses. When Patience’s presence is discovered, some of the company’s goons drown her.

But Patience’s body is then swarmed by cats, the “leader” of which is an Egyptian Mau named Midnight. Similar to what we saw in Batman Returns, she is brought back to life, and quickly finds herself changed. Patience, confused, finds her way to Midnight’s owner, an older woman named Ophelia (Frances Conroy), who explains that Patience has been reborn as a “cat woman,” and possessor of amazing, cat-like powers. Patience’s newfound abilities help her change from a henpecked, meek perennial victim to a bold, adventurous vigilante. She dons a domino mask during an attempted jewelry store robbery, kicks the ass of the thieves, and Catwoman is born.

To this point, Catwoman really isn’t that bad. Sure, “Patience Phillips” is a groaner, the kind of placeholder name that should have been changed before production actually started. But once you accept the movie is its own thing, and Batman is not going to show up, you can settle in and go for the ride. In particular, the jewelry store sequence is terrific, and Berry, in her newly shorn hair, looks great as this alternate version of Catwoman. It’s a completely different take than what we saw in Returns, and it works all on its own.

Unfortunately, it’s after this that Patience decides to don a full, custom-made “Catwoman” costume, complete with kitty ears, claws, and chains. And it just looks stupid. It makes Berry appear ridiculous (she helped design it, so she really has no one to blame but herself) and the fact that no one in the movie ever remarks upon it makes the whole venture almost completely collapse. Patience tries to keep her romantic interest, a police detective named Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt), from finding out her secret. Eventually, she finds herself squaring off against Laurel Hedare who, since she has been getting high on her own supply of skin cream, has gone from criminally indifferent to murderously violent.

One of the other things I did appreciate about Catwoman is how relatively “small” the story is: There’s no giant blue beam Patience has to stop from destroying the city. Laurel Hedare’s product will maim or maybe kill lots of people, sure, but that’s the kind of plan the Joker or Two-Face might execute on the poor souls who live in Gotham. So I liked that attempt at grounding the film and keeping it from getting too big. I also liked that the romantic subplot was kept to a relative minimum. It’s nice that Patience finally reveals her secret to Tom, but at no point does he steal the action, and the film ends with Catwoman ready for more adventures, focusing exclusively on her.

But the film, a lot of the time, has a glossy, slightly fuzzy, plastic-y look that is at odds with the gritty world Catwoman lives in. Lambert Wilson gets the “Faye Dunaway in Supergirl” Award for egregiously overacting; he’s such a one-note cartoon that he sinks almost every scene he’s in. Ultimately, of course, that’s the fault of director Pitof, whose job it was to rein him in. For her part, big time movie star Sharon Stone makes for a potentially imposing villain, but she’s not given enough to do to really register (at least she is spared the humiliation of a goofy costume).

Catwoman’s rep is that it was a major box-office disaster, which isn’t really true. It made $82 million on a $100 million budget, so while that’s still a loss, it’s nothing compared to the red ink spilled by The Flash or Joker: Folie a Deux. Plus, Warner Bros. definitely made some money back from the flood of merchandising tie-ins: There was a Catwoman video game, various books, even a Barbie doll. Unfortunately, all of them feature Berry in that dumb, Male Gaze costume, which cuts against the whole, “This is a character for girls to look up to” thing.

Speaking of tie-ins, there was of course an adaptation of the movie from DC Comics, by Chuck Austen, Tom Derenick, and Adam Dekraker. The costume looks a little less absurd and silly on the page, and the sketchbook pages by Jim Lee come close to making it look cool, but still no cigar. This is just a guess on my part, but I think the producers of the movie thought they couldn’t stray (heh) too far from what people expected of a “Catwoman” movie, so they had to show some fealty to the kitty eared look.

Having not seen the movie until it was time for CATWOMAN WEEK here at 13th D, I never knew they had a perfectly workable Catwoman costume in the movie already; only to ditch it. I don’t think it would have solved all the movie’s problems, but it might have helped get people into the theater who saw the poster (like myself) and went, “Nah.”

One final note: Catwoman does take place in the Batman cinematic universe it was indirectly spawned from. In a scene with Patience and Ophelia, we get a glimpse of different Catwomen through the ages and we see one that looks mighty familiar:

I liked that gag, and I wish they had just gone all the way and thrown in shots of Julie Newmar, Lee Meriwether, and Eartha Kitt. Cats have nine lives, you know!

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MORE

— The Complete CATWOMAN WEEK Index of Features. Click here.

— CATWOMAN’s 85-Year History Through 13 CLASSIC COLLECTIBLES. Click here.

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ROB KELLY is a podcaster, writer, illustrator, and film commentator. You can find his work at robkellycreative.com.