Tim Burton Had An $18 Million Idea For A Catwoman Spinoff
These days, "Batman Returns" rightfully gets its due. But Tim Burton's sequel to his 1989 effort, "Batman," was assailed by critics upon its release, who felt that it was either too dark, too overcrowded with characters, lacking in plot, or just plain weird. Even many fans were ticked off by the Burton-ness of the whole thing and felt the director and screenwriter, Daniel Waters, had strayed too far from the core of the Dark Knight.
In a way, they were right. Burton had let his freak flag fly, making his own movie and not necessarily a Batman movie. Waters admitted as much after a recent screening of "Returns," saying (via IndieWire):
"It was a weird assignment in that I didn't need to please anyone but Tim Burton. Before the internet, you didn't have to go before a tribunal and say what you were doing — it was just two guys in a room riffing. We didn't know s**t about Batman villains."
On top of that, there was the whole Mcdonald's "Batman Returns" marketing controversy. The fast food giant pushed Warner Bros. and Burton to make changes to the film after seeing a rough cut of the director's expressionist nightmare and quickly realizing their Happy Meal deal wasn't going to be the synergistic marketing masterpiece they'd envisioned. Add to that the fact that there was a whole talk show dedicated to "Returns" and its supposed harmful effects on the younger generation, and you've got one hell of a controversial opening for a movie.
But there was one aspect of the film that seemed to go down well with pretty much everyone: Michelle Pfeiffer's Selina Kyle/Catwoman. Following the release of "Returns," there were plans for a spin-off starring Pfeiffer's villain, and it seems Burton had big plans for how to make it.
The Burton Catwoman film that never was
"Batman Returns" might have proved controversial, but it still brought in $266 million on an $80 million budget. Unfortunately for Burton, his idiosyncratic take on the Dark Knight caused too much of a headache for Warner Bros., which swiftly replaced him with Joel Schumacher for the next film in the franchise, 1995's "Batman Forever."
But Burton was given a Catwoman spin-off and had enlisted Waters to once again pen a script for the film. As the screenwriter told The Hollywood Reporter, Michelle Pfeiffer's performance seemed to resonate with audiences to the extent Warners decided to hurriedly add a shot to the end of the film showing Catwoman alive and well after she seemingly perished in an electrical fire in the prior scene. Waters added:
"The final shot of her head coming into foreground, that was literally done two weeks before the movie came out. Test screenings showed that people responded positively to the Catwoman character, so the studio wanted a more concrete glimpse that she was still alive."
A Catwoman spin-off was basically a no-brainer for Warners, then. Frustratingly for Burton, however, Waters' vision of the film didn't quite align with his own. As the writer revealed during the recent "Returns" screening, Burton "wanted to do an $18 million black-and-white movie, like the original 'Cat People,' of Selina just lowkey living in a small town." Meanwhile, Waters was planning "a 'Batman' movie where the metaphor was about 'Batman.'" This version would have seen Selina Kyle "move to a Los Angeles version of Gotham City," which was "run by three a*****e superheroes." According to Waters, this version of the film was "'The Boys' before 'The Boys'" but Burton "got exhausted" reading the script.
The Cat People meets Kitten With a Whip
We all know how the Catwoman saga played out. The Halle Berry-starring solo movie arrived in 2004 and became an infamous flop of historic proportions, winning Berry a Razzie that she promptly set on fire. Which, in retrospect, makes Tim Burton's "Cat People" inspired spin-off sound a heck of a lot more enticing.
1942's "Cat People" starred Simone Simon as Irena Dubrovna, a newlywed who's convinced she's a descendant of a tribe that was capable of transforming into panthers. The low-budget black and white horror film received a mixed critical reaction (much like "Batman Returns"), but did spawn a 1944 sequel, "The Curse of the Cat People." Interestingly enough, Waters revealed to Bloody Disgusting that Burton also wanted to take inspiration from 1964's Ann-Margret-starring 'Kitten With a Whip'. The writer added:
"I think he wanted to do a small bonsai tree of a creepy movie. Like Selina Kyle not going to a big city, but going to a small town, and make it small and creepy. And, you know, maybe I ignored him, or I didn't listen to him, or I thought, 'Okay, that's interesting, I'm gonna try to incorporate that into my big epic version.' So I created this just huge, bombastic, Catwoman-going-to-another-city [story]."
You can find Waters' first-draft script for his "bombastic" spin-off online, but as he told Bloody Disgusting, "I was gonna make nice, brilliant changes like a writer always does, but it's out there, and it's very silly." Burton, meanwhile, seemed distinctly uninterested in the project following his removal from the Batman franchise, and turned his attention to what would become his 1994 effort "Ed Wood." In retrospect, that was probably a good decision, as his biopic of the cult filmmaker is often cited as Burton's best film.