Acting is a notoriously precarious profession. This applies as much to gaining ground as it does to sustaining the career of an A-lister star. One slip – one crash – and you could fall into the mud.
That’s how Halle Berry felt when, symbolically, she appeared to receive her Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Actress for “Catwoman” (2004). Bursting as if it were a huge honor, she thanked Warner Bros. for placing it in “a part of the st, strange film. It was just what my career needed! I was in charge! And ‘Catwoman’ just blew me away at the end.”
Two years earlier, Berry had won an all-important Oscar for “Monster’s Ball,” making her the first black actress ever to win in the top category.
She dedicated that Oscar to any “nameless, faceless woman of color” who might find doors open because of him. The problem for Berry himself was that the door swung wide, but it turned out to be a cat crash.
The fee that lured him to this ridiculous station was 14 million dollars, which pushed Berry to the ranks of Hollywood’s best men. Tobey Maguire took in $17.5 million for the same year’s Spider-Man 2, a huge hit for Sony.
Warner Bros. were in the process of reviving the underwhelming DC brand “Batman Begins,” but they were taking their time. In “Catwoman,” it was a different story: sheer haste made it a fiasco. Executives needed something to fill a superhero blank slate for the summer of 2004, and once they signed Berry, they pushed it into production.
One of the film’s own screenwriters, John Rogers, explained in 2018 that it was a “film thrown out by the studio at the end of a style cycle and had no cultural relevance either in front of or behind the camera”. Oh.
Berry’s performance and the film received an equal share of derision when it came out, bombing both critically and commercially. Her career took a hit and she would never again earn the same profits from a single role.
Still, it clawed its way back to banking and modest appreciation, which is more than can be said for its director, Jean-Christophe “Pitof” Comar, who disappeared virtually without a trace after the film’s flop.
Berry narrowly avoided starring in “Gigli” (2003), too – last year’s biggest bomb. When the baffling crime comedy was being developed, she and Jennifer Lopez were the two hottest stars being considered to play Ricky, the lesbian gangster whom Ben Affleck’s title character seduces.
“She beat me to the job,” Berry said recently on Dax Shepard’s podcast. “Boy, I’m glad she did. I may not sit here now.”
The shoot was where Bennifer began — 20 years before they got back together, 22 before J.Lo filed for divorce.
Before filming, Lopez had been married for just a few months to Cris Judd, a dancer she met around the time of her split from Puff Daddy. After they were done, Affleck took out a full-page commercial complimenting his star, and everyone was pampered at a surprise party for her 32nd birthday that July.
A summer of love followed with their engagement – we have the evidence in the “Jenny from the Block” video – and these two became the most exposed celebrity couple of the day. The film’s marketing campaign needed to be stepped up, but consumers were fed up.
The film was shaping up to be “Bennifer: The Movie” and it already had the look of something hubristic and self-indulgent – a love for a super couple. The ghastly poster showed a smitten Bennifer staring into each other’s eyes and looked visibly photoshopped, right down to Lopez’s tight-denim buns.
Many other reasons doomed “Gigli” beyond the star pairing. It was a wildly misunderstood mash-up of genres, with a title no one could pronounce, and a script that got badly messed up when the producer, Joe Roth of Revolution Studios, rejected writer-director Martin Brest’s original cut. Sony’s marketing division had no idea what to do with it. The romance was hardened into desperation and a light happy ending was invented, but after all, it had no chance of being hailed as a thriller.
When “Gigli,” which cost $75 million, opened to $3.8 million in August 2003, Affleck and Brest left each other’s wounds. “I was like, it’s just spectacular, it’s a tsunami, it couldn’t be worse. That’s as bad as it gets,’” Affleck recalls now. It actually got worse: in its third weekend, the film flopped in disgust from a record 97% of the screens it opened on.
The barrage of unseemly publicity that followed all of this certainly seems to have tarnished Bennifer’s engagement, which was called off in January. Both stars took years to recover – Affleck with a clever pivot to directing and an ultimately unhappy stint as Batman; Lopez focusing on her music, ahead of “Hustlers” (2019) and the Superbowl. Their director, like Pitof, crawled into a hole and never came out.
After the release of “Alexander” (2004), Colin Farrell was tempted to do the same. He rethought his entire approach to acting and now admits that the film’s failure was a crushing blow.
“When I say expectations,” he explained in 2023, “we all had our tuxedos ready. I’m not even kidding. We were all like ‘Right guys, we’re going to the Oscars, that’s a sure thing.’ Because we had Oliver Stone, we had a story of that magnitude, we had a script that was really exciting, just brilliant and so muscular. And then it came out.”
Farrell wasn’t the new kid on the block—he had broken into Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), as the villain in Daredevil (2003), and a string of hit thrillers. But taking on an epic on this scale, using his native Irish accent to play the Macedonian invader, and being subjected to the strongest bleaching job this side of Jon Heder in Blades of Glory? These were decisions that came to bite him cruelly.
“I wish he would have listened to me about the wigs,” his co-star Val Kilmer would say. According to a review by Wesley Morris, “It’s full of great highlights and they’re all in Colin Farrell’s hair.”
Media attention dwindled to the film’s non-heterosexuality and began to tear it apart from all sides. “Queer Eye for the Macedonian Guy,” sneered The Post in a preliminary article, which also called hero Bagoa’s lover a “topless Persian castrato.”
Stone was caught between a rock and a hard place – snubbed by the mainstream press while also being accused of fraud by LGBTQ+ commentaries. As he wistfully told the Sunday Telegraph, “The Gates criticized me for not making Alexander openly gay, and in the Bible Belt pastors were in the pulpit saying that to see this film you would have to be tempted by Satan.”
Nothing could quell the conservative anger, which was mobilized in a de facto boycott – and was boosted by damning ratings across America.”Alexander” fared much better overseas than in the US, where it opened a miserable sixth over the 5-day Thanksgiving weekend.
“[To] everyone I met,” Farrell recalls now, “I wanted to say, ‘Have you seen ‘Alexander’? If you have, I’m so sorry.’ “
Tim Robey’s book “Box Office Poison: The Story of Hollywood in a Declining Century” is now available through Hanover Square Press
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Image Source : nypost.com