From Catwoman to Gigli, Hollywoods biggest flops

Acting is an infamously insecure vocation.This applies just as much to gaining a foothold as sustaining an A-lister’s star career.

One slip – one flop – and you can tumble into the mud.This is how Halle Berry felt when, iconically, she showed up to collect her Golden Raspberry award as Worst Actress for “Catwoman” (2004).Gushing as if it were a huge honor, she thanked Warner Bros.

for putting her in “a piece of s–t, godawful movie.It was exactly what my career needed! I was at the top! And ‘Catwoman’ just plummeted me to the bottom.”Two years before, Berry had won a highly significant Oscar for “Monster’s Ball,” making her the first black actress ever to win in the leading category. She dedicated that Oscar to every “nameless, faceless woman of color” who might find doors opened because of it.

The trouble for Berry herself was that the door was swung wide, but turned out to be a cat-flap.The fee that lured her into this laughing stock was a juicy $14 million, which thrust Berry towards the ranks of Hollywood’s top male earners.Tobey Maguire got $17.5 mllion for the same year’s “Spider-Man 2,” an enormous smash for Sony. Warner Bros were in the process of resuscitating the terminally uncool DC brand with “Batman Begins,” but they were taking their time.

On “Catwoman,” it was a different story: sheer haste made it a fiasco.Executives needed something to fill a blank superhero slate for the summer of 2004, and as soon as they signed Berry, they shoved it through production.One of the film’s own screenwriters, John Rogers, explained in 2018 that it was a “a s–t movie dumped by the studio at the end of a style cycle, and had zero cultural relevance either in front of or behind the camera.” Ouch.Berry’s performance and the film took an equal share of ridicule when it came out, bombing both critically and commercially.

Her career took a nasty hit, and she would never command anything like the same earnings agai...