Why Halle Berry's Catwoman Couldn't Use The Batman Character's Real Name

Warner Bros.

In the 2004 film "Catwoman," the junky, notoriously bad superheroine flick from the French director Pitof, Halle Berry plays a character named Patience Phillips, a largely overlooked employee for a giant cosmetics company. That company is about to launch a powerful and effective anti-aging skin cream product that, Patience accidentally learns, can not only destroy the user's skin over time, but also has addictive qualities. The head of the company, Laurel (Sharon Stone), wants to launch the product anyway, and when she finds that Patience overheard her scheme, Laurel attempts to kill her. 

Patience washes up on shore after the assassination attempt, and a magical cat (!) happens by her body. The cat revives her, and she is granted eerie, catlike powers. Her balance is improved, she sleeps on little ledges, and she goes feral when she's horny. Her costume was a bizarre mishmash of diamond nails, a vinyl mask, and ripped trousers. We once called it one of the worst superhero movie costumes of all time.

Fans of the Catwoman character will cry foul immediately on all of the above points. In the original DC Comics, Catwoman was a character named Selina Kyle, and she was a cat burglar without any superpowers at all. Like all comic book characters, Catwoman has undergone many character changes since her introduction in 1940, but a lot of what appeared in Pitof's movie was wholly original, inventing an all-new version of the Catwoman character. Batman purists (and, really, most everyone) hated the movie. 

It turns out, however, that Warner Bros. had to change Catwoman's character for legal reasons. Although they owned the film rights to Catwoman, the studio also had a contract with actress Michelle Pfeiffer, giving her dibs on the Selina Kyle character after she played the role in 1992's "Batman Returns."

Warner Bros.

In an Inverse oral history from 2024, co-screenwriter John Rogers gave readers the skinny. The main reason Selina Kyle was replaced by Patience Phillips, as with so many Hollywood decisions, boiled down to money. In 2004, Michelle Pfeiffer seemingly fetched a higher salary than Halle Berry, and Warner Bros. wasn't willing to pay her fee for a solo "Catwoman" feature film. Co-screenwriter John Rogers (credited alongside Michael Ferris and John Brancato) explained it very plainly:

"The execs were like, 'We can't make it Selina Kyle because there's a contract issue. So if it's not Michelle Pfeiffer, who we can't afford anymore, it can't be Selina Kyle.' That's why it's Patience Phillips."

"Catwoman," incidentally, still cost $100 million to make, and Berry once admitted that she made more money playing Catwoman than any of her previous roles. 

To kind of take the curse off of the fact that Warner Bros. decided to muck around with the established lore of DC Comics, there is a brief scene in "Catwoman" wherein a character named Ophelia (Frances Conroy) explains the history of Catwomen in the world, and one can see a photo of Michelle Pfeiffer as she appeared in "Batman Returns." So Halle Berry's Patience Phillips was merely another Catwoman in a universe that already had a few. 

Incidentally, Rogers hated the movie. He was fired from the process very early on because he wouldn't take the studio's increasingly silly notes. An article in EW preserved some old Twitter posts that Rogers made once upon a time, where he openly called it "a s*** movie." 

Warner Bros.

If you're an aspiring screenwriter hoping to make it big in Hollywood, it may be wise to take any studio notes you are given, even if they suck. John Rogers, however, couldn't help himself, and claimed in the the EW article that he "kept arguing with notes that'd make the movie 'very, very bad.' Which I said out loud. At meetings." Yeah, that's not going to earn you a lot of respect from your bosses. Rogers was eventually scooped out of the litter box that was "Catwoman." 

Rogers has no sentimental feelings about "Catwoman." Indeed, a Twitter user pointed out that "Black Panther" was lauded for its Black representation, while "Catwoman" wasn't, and Rogers had to chime in to explain: 

"As one of the credited writers of 'Catwoman,' I believe I have the authority to say: because it was a s*** 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. [...] This is a bad take. Feel shame."

EW also noted that Rogers never actually watched the movie all the way through, and that he skipped the premiere. Rogers is right: "Catwoman" is quite bad. "[N]obody in power knew what movie they wanted," he posted. 

"Catwoman" was widely panned and was nominated for seven Razzie Awards, winning Worst Picture and Worst Actress. Halle Berry, at least, was a sport about "Catwoman," and appeared to pick up her Razzie award in person and to give a teary thank-you speech. She brought her Oscar with her. That speech might have been the best thing to come out of "Catwoman."