Wow — according to BoxOfficeMojo.Com, Catwoman is a financial as well as critical disaster. The film took in less than $18 million this weekend after costing an estimated $135 million to make and market (including a $12.5 million payday for Halle Berry).
Personally, I thought the marketing for the film was absurd and somewhat offensive. Roger Ebert sums the film up this way,
“Catwoman” is a movie about Halle Berry’s beauty, sex appeal, figure, eyes, lips and costume design. It gets those right. Everything else is secondary, except for the plot, which is tertiary. What a letdown.
In other words, take the absurdly adolescent view of female sexuality that (still) tends to permeate comic books, and then turn it up a notch. Yeah, that’s a film I really want to see. (The Catwoman costume looked so stupid and over-sexualized that even the fanboys couldn’t find it in their, uh, hearts to embrace it).
Didn’t these people watch “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” and their sequels? You have to be able to sell the characters as real people or it becomes impossible to suspend disbelief about the whole super power thing.