Into the Catwoman-Verse!

Who do you think would win in a fight? Catwoman or Harley Quinn? I see you must have watched Batman Returns. Oh, no. Because while I was watching, I was like, you know, she seems a lot more like Harley Quinn than most iterations of Catwoman I've seen. That's kind of what gave me the idea. Well, because like Tim Burton would do a way better Harley Quinn than he would a Catwoman. At least for their normal personalities they generally have. Well, I mean, as our viewers have probably guessed, we're clearly covering a Harley Quinn theory today. Wait, what? We're not covering anything that will be anywhere near as popular as a Harley Quinn movie? What are we covering? We are covering the beloved film Catwoman with Halle Berry. The 2004 Catwoman movie directed by Pitoff, written by John Brancato, Teresa, Robb, and the great Michael Ferris, our good buddy. We had the chance to interview Michael Ferris, a screenwriter who's written, of course, many

movies, including Catwoman. He's written, of course, many better movies than Catwoman, Terminator 4, Terminator Salvation, The Net, The Game, and The Net. The Game. Oh, that's a great movie. I love The Game. We had the chance to ask him some of the burning questions that everybody has always wanted to know about the 2004 masterpiece Catwoman. Yeah, you'll be hearing some segments from that interview today as we talk about Catwoman. So what do you think of the movie Catwoman? Is it a good movie? Oh, you know, I think with time, it's not as bad as people remember. I completely agree. If you go into Catwoman now knowing it's sort of legacy, or either you're going to go into it knowing it's legacy or knowing nothing about it, possibly more likely the latter these days, but, uh, and if you do go into it thinking it's terrible, uh, you're probably going to be pleasantly surprised that it's not as terrible as you remember.

Right. That's about all that good I can say about it. It's not as Catwoman tagline. It's not as terrible as you remember. And you have to remember that Catwoman came out during like the birth of the superhero genre as we know it today. It came out just amidst like the greatest Spider-Man movies ever made. And I think people were starting to expect a little more from superhero movies. And Catwoman and Elektra did not necessarily deliver what people were expecting. Anytime Harley Quinn comes up and cop, anytime Harley Quinn, anytime Catwoman. Oh my gosh. Go and say this. Mr. Guilter's alleged walk.

Dude, it was exactly like that. I said the same thing wrong, but corrected the minor mistake in the sentence. Mr. Guilter's walk. Mr. Guilter's alleged walk. Oh, that was amazing writing. That was, that was top notch Will and Grace. Doesn't get better than that, except for maybe, uh, I think two guys together is hot. I hope our listeners love our just random out of nowhere Will and Grace references. Anytime Catwoman actually comes up in conversation, you know, as it often does being the cultural, the pinnacle of cultural awareness that it is. Can't count the number of times I've just randomly been like, you remember that basketball scene usually when it comes up it's about the basketball scene that's what most people talk about we can't we can't drop the basketball scene at the very beginning we gotta work up to that but whenever it does come up people are usually talking about the basketball scene and then they will usually say that movie was terrible or that movie was

awful or man oh it killed Halle Berry's career I gotta say looking at it now you know 20 years later. It's not that bad. It's not good, but I don't know. How mean do we want to be to this movie? Michael Ferris accepted the Razzie. Okay, good. It's not good, but it's not that bad. And honestly, Halle Berry's acting as Catwoman is actually totally acceptable. She's not a bad actor. I think with Patience Phillips, she clearly watched Michelle Pfeiffer's performance in Batman Returns and did that. And she did it very well. I very much like Patience Phillips at the very beginning of this movie. Halle Berry's awkward performance is great. I love her outfit, not her Catwoman outfit, but her normal person outfit that she wears every single day. Every day, she never changes. Might this factor into a theory of yours? It might, it might. We'll get to that. I think that her outfit was a little too much.

This is not the best Catwoman outfit. Right. I just think it didn't really help the movie. It turned it into like just a fan service thing. Right, and a movie that's not very fan service-y in any other way. So it kind of gives the wrong impression of the film. And then I think the nail in the coffin is that this is a movie set in the Batman universe and Batman never even shows up or is mentioned. Michael Ferris had something to say about that. Tim Burton's films like acknowledge Batman. You know, one of the mandates we had going in was that this was not going to be a universe with Batman in it, which is weird because we I mean, we weren't the first writers, by any means. And the problem coming in that late in the game is that anything you want to try, they've already tried. And for one reason or another, you go, well, maybe we could try it again and maybe we'll get it right this time. But they didn't want to have to keep going back to ideas they failed.

And one of them was having it in a universe that, you know, accommodates Batman. I mean, early drafts had not that he was ever a character in it, but that they would acknowledge that there's this city of Gotham nearby where some guy running around wearing a funny cape. And they were funny gags. And I thought it was like it was kind of I would have liked to preserve that. But they was very they were very definitive that Catwoman exists just in her own right, you know, interacting with anybody else in the DC universe. Yeah. You know, it was just very unclear because of so many attempts in the past, like what Catwoman was really about, not really a supervillain. She's more or less a victim a lot of the time. It was, you know, I mean, it was just it was it was a little bit fuzzy headed. And I mean, I have to take some responsibility for that. We didn't find a way to clarify it. But, I mean, they really were, you know, clutching in straws at times to figure out how to wrap this whole thing up.

And I just think that's interesting because, of course, in 2004, no one had figured out, hey, shared universes are cool. People like that. For whatever reason, at this time, they thought that if you made a movie, it had to be standalone. So if this is a Catwoman movie, try not to even mention Batman. Like, she needs to stand on her two legs. How weird. Because, like, don't they realize that... Yeah, just look at the comics. They had been around for decades. And what do they think? Who do they think their audience is? Their audience is people who like Batman, right? Nobody wants to see Catwoman except for Batman fans. I just don't get it. What are they doing? So about this movie and maybe why it was badly received, Michael Ferris had a few thoughts about that. So let's hear what he had to say. I mean, structurally, the movie is pretty close to what we wrote, except that oddly, and I think it's mainly for budgetary reasons, all the action is gone.

I mean, I didn't really realize until we watched the first cut that it's an action movie with almost no action. i mean we had scenes where like she's jumping from a bridge onto a burning boat and wrestling the bad guy with sheets of broken glass you know and and well like and i i mean i don't think anyone hated it they just for some reason couldn't shoot couldn't afford it or something yeah yeah you know there's not even like an exploding helicopter i know we like at some point it was It's like, you know, I mean, there's a couple of mano-a-mano bits of business, but it's just weird how all the action kind of disappeared. Pitoff is a super stylish director. Well, they hired him on the basis of a movie made with Gerard Depardieu in France. But, I mean, again, with a relatively limited budget, he made stuff that looked like a million bucks, you know. I mean, also, frankly, none of our dialogue really survived.

so now that i told you that none of our action or our dialogues yeah what's left it was our draft that brought halle berry on board so that's what wound up you know with screen credit so for better or worse i think the overall arc of the movie sort of reflects what we wrote but i mean i don't know like like there were little bits of business that i really liked like at one point she's trashing the factory and she's singing the old uh wreath franklin song you know but she's changed the words to r-e-v-e-n-g-e find out what it means that's like a funny gag that is that's good i don't think that made it into the movie i didn't see it i've heard many times that this is the movie that quote unquote killed hallie berry's career do you buy that do you think this movie killed her career i mean i can see a lot of things since 2004 but i can see what people are saying die at that point she was just coming off fresh from like x-men swordfish and now you know cat

woman her brand new superhero career not that x-men was a bad movie what are you talking about i mean one actor's performance doesn't if an actor's in a good movie they can give a bad performance and still have a good right but i would say as much as i love storm the general character she is one of the worst parts of that movie i have something to ask you who would win in a fight a toad or lightning well i just you know i've never been sure what happens to a toad when it gets struck by lightning if only someone dude only someone could answer that question for me i'll tell you the same thing that happens to everything else whoa you mean they would just fly away into like the sunset at night in the water and disappear yeah they just kind of fly off into the night dude i've got another question for you what would like an insane rage-fueled warlock toad announce as he goes to banish his enemies dude as he goes to take out all the x-men single-handedly

yeah at the same time and it shall be forever dark oh toad was so cool he didn't deserve to lose to the storm oh my gosh oh man i took out all the x-men they brought all of them at the same time magneto literally only had toad saber tooth was only there because he wanted to scream.

And he'd take any scream. Mystique doesn't count. She was Wolverine during that fight. She was on their side. Yeah. Oh, man. We should talk more about X-Men. Dude, screw Catwoman. Hey, Torvald, who do you think was the target audience for this film? Batman. Well, no, not Batman fans because they don't connect it to Batman. Exactly. You know what? That's a really good question. I guess, like, romance fans? I don't know. Well, according to Michael Ferris, maybe we'll hear from him here. No, I don't know. I mean, Catwoman was savaged everywhere. For sure, yeah. And I think we realized the target audience was 11-year-old girls and gay men. Wow! That is who this movie was appealing to. Because it's so campy. Yeah, it's campy and silly and not very action-packed. I mean, in those communities, the movie played for great guns. I can see it. You know, my daughters liked it at the time. Yeah, that's good.

Then it's a success. So what is the theory for this movie? The persona of Catwoman is not just a single person. And in fact, this movie is in a shared universe, contrary to what you just said. This is in a shared universe with the original Tim Burton Batman movies, Batman and Batman Returns specifically. There are many catwomen in the world, super powered women who have gained enhanced reflexes, possibly multiple lives. And also they were granted these powers by an ancient cat god. So every catwoman we've ever seen, they all exist in the same universe and they're just different catwomen. That's the theory here. there have been a lot of catwomen oh gosh so many batman 66 that one had three catwomen it had julie newmar lee merriweather and of course the legendary eartha kit i can't think of anyone more perfect to play catwoman oh my gosh she said perfect wrong more perfect to play catwoman she's so cool dude there is a the making of documentary for um the catwoman movie

uh the Halle Berry Catwoman movie it was hosted by Eartha Kitt it was so good I loved it oh my gosh probably better than the movie itself it was it was so good dude but is is not Anne Hathaway like the worst Catwoman who ever existed dude I'm so surprised I had no idea Anne Hathaway was ever Catwoman yeah it's crazy you just forget about her well I didn't even know because I walked out of that movie good that's a good choice i know it was like the best choice i've ever made in my entire life and i've never regretted it once i consider dark knight rises to be the worst movie ever made some people seem to like it and defend it so i don't know i will defend the character of bane in that movie because he is ridiculous he is absolutely ridiculous and the only reason that character is good is because they put him in the harley quinn show and that's what they used and harley quinn he reveals a poster that just has two face on it and says two faces and he's like

this is a poster of both of us bane and bane's like this is not a picture of both of us i'm not on the poster he's like no it's two faces yours and mine he's like but but i'm not on the poster I see you. I see on this side there is darkness and that is where I was born, but it is not me.

Oh, that's so good. But yeah, that's part one of the theory. I think you had another theory in here you might want to let our viewers know about. Patience Phillips in this movie actually does have split personalities and she is suicidal. And there's a lot of evidence to support that she's actually crazy which also would connect to the tim burton batman universe yeah yeah the need for a cat god the first bit of evidence i would put forth for this theory is that her name is not cat woman's name her name is not selena kyle she's not like that her name like you said is patience phillips and cat woman has never been named patience phillips before so this is clearly already a different person never would be named patience phillips again never again no one's ever going to use that name as a cursed name now no matter what michael ferris said to us clearly someone involved in the making this movie wanted it to at least be able to fit into tim burton's

universe and i think that there's good evidence for that when you look at like joel schumacher's batman batman forever um like that one obviously had all different actors but it really try mostly different actors excuse me right no no sorry I was about to say it got lots of different actors but it tried to sort of fit into the same universe even though it was also its own thing and I think that Catwoman is trying to do the same thing like they weren't they didn't want to step on the Tim Burton thing like you can imagine it's there if you want even if they weren't really addressing it did Michael Ferris like brush us off was he just like no we never imagined there being multiple Catwomen yes he did why he's wrong so no i there's evidence that the cast and crew all understood this and accepted it hallie berry in an interview she says and i quote our movie sort of presents this version of catwoman as just one of many she doesn't take the place of selena kyle or the great character

that ertha kit created many years ago she's just another one another catwoman which can totally confirms it and the movie starts out by establishing this by showing a bunch of like newspaper clippings and like ancient carvings of other catwomen right like it shows Egyptian cat women and then it shows newspapers with like family rescued by masked woman in black and it shows a picture of a cat woman and masked jewel thief at it again and there's a cat woman I believe that most of the people involved in this movie like you said even the cast and crew were fully aware of Tim Burton's Batman films probably liked them and wanted it to be part of the universe the same universe generally the executives in charge who are the ones advising the writer are gonna say no don't put anything in there and i think it's probably just a rights issue i think they didn't want to pay tim burton anything like because he kind of created the look and the

characters and so i think officially their answer was no nowadays when they sign the deal with the writer or director whatever they would like make it so they own it and they can continue to use it kind of thing one of the first things i said to michael ferris was just i like the moment where detective tom lone which like he really is a beefcake with a name like that i think i think patience phillips best friend calls him a beefcake patience phillips best friend who of course is played by mrs ungemeier from detective tom lone when he first meets patience phillips she is going out onto her window to save a cat so at this moment i actually think is very good and i think it's well written. And not only does it establish Halle Berry's character very well, that she's strange, but she's nice. She's going to save the cat. Save the cat is screenwriter lingo, like screenwriter slang for making your character likable near the beginning by having them do

something that is likable. They literally have her save the cat. The most cliche one is having them save the cat. The other one is called kick the dog. And that's what you have your villain do you have him kick a dog no but it's it works and i like actually i think that this scene establishes really good chemistry between the two love interests yeah how he's like oh no she's gonna kill herself and she's just trying to save a cat and he's really worried about her i just think it's a fun interesting scene this part actually feeds into my theory that she's suicidal because he thinks she's going to commit suicide in her mind she's saving a cat he never sees the cat outside the house possibly there's no cat there he sees it in her house and she's like look look it's right there she probably owns a cat okay sure no she's going out and she might be having suicidal tendencies but because she's schizophrenic she believes maybe there's a cat

out there so that's that's one point for that theory also at this point in the movie maybe it's a little later is when we see that she does not change her clothes ever she wears the same outfit every day yeah even after crawling around on that disgusting balcony she just rushes off to work if the cat is real then it was trying to kill her right right because uh i mean it's a sentient cat as we find out later it's it knows what it's doing it's trying to kill her it wants to breathe in her mouth no i think you're right this movie gets a lot of flack for the uh cinematography And I think that Pitoff possibly deserves that flack, but he was trying for something very deliberate with the cinematography of this movie. This movie is like constantly ping pong balling back and forth between super slow like time lapses and super fast like crazy cuts. It's like the movie is on like crack or catnip.

I think it's supposed to represent her different personalities or states of mind. Or just like a cat. A cat might be sunbathing and then all of a sudden it gets up and runs away. Oh, you're right. And I think that this is what led to the basketball scene. So let's talk about the basketball scene. So the basketball scene is infamous. We've mentioned it already. I counted it last night. It's over a hundred cuts, like a hundred shots in that basketball sequence. It's pretty good. Michael Ferris had this to say. We were writers number 15 and 17, as I recall, out of like the 20s that worked on this. I mean, when we were off the project, they brought in somebody else and then they were still sort of like struggling and they said, well, have you got anything else for us? And we came up with the idea of the basketball scene. We got re-hired on the basis of that. Wow. Like they have a sexy one-on-one basketball scene.

Yeah. this makes the basketball scene so much better i think they got rehired because they suggested the basketball scene oh my gosh that's what got the producers like yes that fixed the movie it just wasn't working out but the basketball scene ties it all together well i mean um you know that sounds like exactly what some stupid executive hollywood producer would do be like yeah we need more sex we need them playing basketball and shaking their butts in front of kids and we could get a shot of holly berry's butt just like shaking around then really quickly cut back to Tom Lone just being like, whoa! And I'm like, oh! Oh my God. It's horrible. As much as I enjoy the cinematography of this movie with all the cuts, that scene is incredibly awful. That's an impressive amount of cuts. It's impressively bad basketball playing. Like, neither of them can clearly even handle a basketball at all.

This does happen. There's a doctor who is describing to the executives all the horrible side effects of their skincare products. She happens to observe this doctor telling about all the horrible things that the product does, and they chase her and kill her, basically. So you might say that sliding around in the waste treatment pipes and absorbing all of the horrible chemicals from the face cream gave her her powers? No, that would clearly turn you into a penguin. Right, yes. That's what I was going to say. if that is what had done it then she would be a penguin she gets uh flushed out dumped off a gigantic cliff into the ocean and ends up on a rock island a cgi cat walks up on her chest and meows for its friends and then they all gather around and then it breathes smoke into her mouth and then her eyes turn into cat eyes and she wakes up with superpowers um so now she can see everything she can hear everything she has like telescope eyes the birds flying like miles away

look like they're in her face which would be really helpful selena kyle in batman returns dies in a somewhat similar way she falls like 30 stories and dies and then a bunch of cats show up and one cat walks up onto her chest and breathes in her mouth and she has a twitchy psychedelic experience and comes back to life basically the exact same experience that patience has in cat woman batman returns doesn't make any sense if she wasn't brought to life by some cat god well how did she survive that i personally feel like tim burton's actual like his actual intention here was that she survived just as a freak coincidence like like she just happened to survive with intense brain damage and that's why after this point she is extremely violent and depressed and weird and always has a band-aid on her head like yeah she clearly went insane because she had head trauma so i don't disagree with that i clearly and what does she do like i actually really i i had never

seen batman returns until today i'd seen the ending but never the whole thing and it is a very good movie like i like it oh it's great she goes home she guzzles like an entire carton of milk she lets all the cats in and then she destroys her apartment she shoves all her stuffed animals down the garbage disposal paints black spray paint everywhere um she puts on black latex and then the best part is she changes her neon sign from hello there to hell here by knocking out the oh and the t is really good like you look at the clues it makes sense that she would go crazy like this because she was already pretty stressed out anyway just before this she was saved from a bad guy by batman and then batman wouldn't talk to her and walked away then she's attacked by another bad guy batman doesn't show up to save her and she wakes up with batman on her mind but also seeing cats so what does she do she's like well batman didn't save me i'm gonna save myself i'm

gonna make a costume and i'm gonna be catwoman just like batman you know because i saw cats her transformation to catwoman is exactly like hallie berry's transformation to catwoman patience goes home starts cutting her hair you know giving herself an awful haircut she puts together a black leather outfit just like michelle pfeiffer did and then goes away to basically rob a jewelry store yes she comes home she drinks milk uh you know tim burton's hallie berry was Tim Burton's Catwoman wasn't as obsessed with like stealing. Like, I don't think she does any stealing, really. She's more obsessed with like revenge. She does go to a store, but she's not like robbing it. And it's just like a mall. And she just wants to like break mannequins with her whip and jump rope. That's all she's doing. Right. Which is another reason why she seems so much more like Harley Quinn. Like, which is why I love so much about Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman is that she's like more.

You just want Catwoman to be Harley Quinn. Well, no, but she's more of a typical Batman villain. Like normally when Catwoman shows up in, this is the only movie where Catwoman is a villain. All the other movies she shows up in, she's sort of an anti-hero. You know, she ends up helping Batman. And this one, she's just a straight up villain. What about the 1960s Batman movie? She was a villain in that one. Well, except that one. Sorry, yeah. It just makes her more consistent because obviously I think the most interesting thing about the Batman universe is that most, if not all of his villains are insane. And the cool thing is that Batman is also insane, but he just uses his insanity for good where they use it for evil. And that's why I don't like any of the Batman arcs that have to do with like the gangsters who aren't insane. Cause I just, they're so terrible. I don't care about Falcone,

you know, just doesn't. Do you care about Shrek? No, well, I mean, it's fine. it's fine when they're around like he's around for a reason you know um but he's not the main bad guy like batman never fights him by the way there is a character in this movie just to make this clear who is named shrek and he is not a green ogre he is christopher walkie sorry yeah just in case you're picturing shrek if you haven't seen this movie it might be confusing um somebody once told me who came up with the idea to have penguin like the disgusting weird danny devito penguin be apparently so unbelievably charismatic and lovable that you could win over the city and become mayor and also at his side christopher walken the world's most like deadpan monotone actor who has ever lived like the man who no one would see is like charismatic and lovable like when he's begging him not to kill his son at the end he's like no take me instead don't kill

my son don't leave him i cannot express how much i love christopher walken he is he's a national treasure are we just going to talk about how that returns now well no i'm just like who came up with the plot what in the no well so i had i had notes about that which is that like of the two plots in this film first of all batman doesn't even have one he's got no plot in this film he's just penguin and catwoman and catwoman's plot i feel like is way more relatable like she's really stressed and she just goes crazy and wants revenge and her plan feels like like it makes a little more sense too she just wants to kill shrek whereas penguin i don't even know what his plan is it's he was dumped into a freezing sewer drain and raised by sewer penguins sewer penguins what are stupid penguins why do they exist and how can he even talk how did he survive did the penguins teach him to talk and also why does he employ so many clowns i was so confused are they

leftovers from joker's gang right well so tim burton apparently just thought joker and penguin are the same guy because why would penguin have an army of freaky clown people doesn't make any i don't get it it's interesting to me that as far as i know and i'm not an expert by any means but as far as i know this is the only personification of the penguin who is like an actual penguin man yes i think usually he's just kind of like a fat rich man this man is a penguin man who was raised by penguins and acts like a penguin i don't think tim burton knew anything about penguin He thought he was Joker as a penguin. He is a penguin man who is the Joker, yes. So I realized near the end of the movie, the reason there are penguins in the sewer and the reason that Penguin has a lair in the sewer is because there was an ancient sewer-located theme park called Arctic World down there. I don't know why, but apparently Arctic World was very cold

and full of penguins. I don't know why. I mean, why is a good question for this whole movie. Like you said, why do people find the Penguin likable? Why does Shrek think that he's a good candidate for mayor? Like there are many iterations of Penguin where this might make sense, but not this one. This is the weirdest, grossest Penguin. Oh my gosh, he's so great. He has green, blue blood, dude. Yeah. Yeah, no, Penguin is so gross in this movie. Dude, but I have to say, when the consultant walks up to him and he's like, hey, not many reflective surfaces in the sewer, eh? And then Penguin's like, hey, could be worse. At least my nose isn't gushing blood. And then everyone laughs until he bites that man's nose off. Dude, now that is a joke. Eat your heart out, Joker. The Penguin is a better Joker than you ever were. So, back to Catwoman. After becoming Catwoman, getting her powers, Patience manages to grab the kitty that brought her back to life.

She finds out it's owned by a woman named Ophelia Powers. Ophelia explains, you're not alone, child. He has saved others before you. Look. And then she shows her a ton of pictures of other different Catwomen. And these pictures include a photo of Michelle Pfeiffer dressed as Catwoman from Batman Returns. Yes, that's the biggest connection there. Why would they have included that? That just says they're in the same universe. But yeah. But Ophelia Powers does continue to explain. She says, Cat women are not contained by the rules of society. You follow your own desires. It's a blessing and a curse. You'll often be alone and misunderstood, but you'll experience a freedom other women will never know. You are a cat woman. I mean, you might say this is just like bad exposition and her explaining everything, but really what it's doing is telling us that there are other cat women. Or, or this could be Patience Phillips.

who is a crazy cat lady talking to her therapist who's like trying to be like you're a cat woman you got some issues but you're so powerful and she interprets it to be like i have superpowers i don't fit in with society when she's trying to say you have trouble fitting in with society because you've got these mental issues and we're gonna work on them because you're strong by the way sorry i think i've glossed over the part where she loses her job where she gets fired because she does kind of like snap at her boss and get an alternate personality for a second and then come back to reality and apologize. Right, yeah, she clearly has split personalities there. She has mood swings, uses kind of different voices. So there's evidence that there's multiple catwomen in Batman Returns. The Penguin, in one of his campaign speeches, he announces that Gotham was ravaged by a disease that turned Boy Scouts into crazed clowns.

He's talking about the Joker from the first Batman movie. And happy homemakers into catwomen. Now, nobody knows about Catwoman yet. He only barely saw her once. And this was just during a confrontation with her and Batman. But he is not talking about a single Catwoman. He's talking about Catwomen. So apparently what he's saying is she is not the first Catwoman. There are others and the city knows about them and is worried about them. And they need a mayor who will help deal with the Catwoman infestation. He also seems to have some misconceptions, though, because just the fact that you say, he says happy homemakers. And he does seem to have assumed that that's what Catwoman is. Because he seems to think she's going to come in bringing him drinks and slippers. Yes, he does think that's what she is.

He's making some odd assumptions here. This scene where he meets Catwoman is evidence of her having undergone a supernatural transformation. You know, she died following like 30 stories and then turned into Catwoman. And then she dies fighting Batman because he like just punches her off like a 10 story building and she falls into a truck full of kitty litter, which is rocks. It wouldn't have been soft. It's not soft. It's like, have you ever fallen into sand? On gravel? Yeah. Like you might be able to dig in sand, but you fall on it. It really hurts. It's rocks. It's solid. And she survives that just fine. She's totally OK after that. And I got to say, Batman threw napalm at her. holy war crime, Batman. Oh my gosh. Jeez. Like when he first took out that capsule, I was like, oh, what kind of kooky Batman gadget is this? Like a anti fall off the roof capsule. But no, it was napalm. He just napalmed her. I was like, well, that's not kooky. That's bad.

Batman, except at the very end of this movie, is totally okay with killing people in this movie. He lights some dude on fire, on purpose with his Batmobile, and then he blows up another guy on purpose this man walks up to batman says go ahead and hit me and then batman punches him and he says hey and then he realized that batman just jammed a bomb into his stomach like punctured his stomach with a bomb and then batman you know just kind of pushes the man away and he explodes yeah i just i have a little mini theory about batman returns just that at the very end he will not let catwoman kill shrek even though shrek is like yeah i need to do it and shrek has a gun so it's not like it's you know unjustified but i think that batman he doesn't want to kill humans but because he's a rich person he only sees other rich people as human he's like don't kill someone at the same class as me he goes to jail he's high society

he's from the same group same circle as i am i mean he basically is waging a class war like the people who he hurts are generally just poor people yeah i love at the end how when he wants to reveal his identity to catwoman who already knows his identity he just rips off his cowl like he just destroys it breaks it like i thought he could remove it without destroying it but apparently no i think he has to make a new one every single time he has tons though he does certainly have a lot of them he see he does he only has single use batman costumes each one is like a disposable costume which makes sense because they get all ripped off right like why use one more than once we gotta talk more about catwoman 2004 so she decides to uh track her stripper oh my god she decides to track her killer to a strip club um did you want to say anything about what she does at this strip oh yeah well one of my favorite

things and just the way that i know this movie knows it was being silly it was never trying to be serious it's it's it's target audience was 11 year old girls and gay men was that i love the joke where she walks in and she just goes up to the bartender and she says i want a white russian no ice no vodka no kalua and the bartender hands it to her saying straight up and it's just milk she just came in and ordered milk like a total badass you're drinking milk at a nightclub lady the fact that the bartender just without batting an eye and so coolly handed it to her is great it's a very good straight-faced you know gag that they pull right there i love it Her boyfriend, the cop, he managed to get, like, a copy of her writing and a copy of Catwoman's writing, and he's having a forensic analyst examine them. And I love how right after, directly after, this analyst says, oh, well, I can't tell.

This is not an exact science. He then goes on to say with certainty that Catwoman's handwriting went from a lonely, people-pleasing person to a self-confident and angry person who doesn't like to play by the rules. which sounds very much like it is an exact science because he knows everything about her now. Well, and it supports that her personality changes on a dime and he even says the handwriting indicates that there are different personalities. Although I don't think that's necessarily a good way to determine someone's mental state, but... No, this guy is an unqualified hack. There's actually lots of that in forensic analysis, which is sad. bite mark, like teeth matching is absolute pseudoscience. Blood spray analysis, absolute pseudoscience. That's what Dexter does. I know. And it's complete bullcrap. They've both been completely disproven. You can't tell anything from a spray of blood and you can't tell anything

from a bite mark. It's impossible. And they're both totally admissible in court and still used today, which is just absolutely stupid. Handwriting analysis is right up there. You cannot tell someone's personality from their handwriting so i think that the ending fight scene is actually a really cool matchup just because i think it's basically catwoman versus colossus which is a cool fight i mean she's fighting a woman who's like made of stone apparently because that's what this makeup does to you i think both you and i had kind of a mandela effect well yeah the ending of this fight is so weird because i remember i we saw it in theaters and as they fight catwoman keeps like scratching and punching this woman and her face starts to crack because she's made of like stone that's what the makeup did right the makeup turns you into stone that's why she has superpower her skin is like stone in the course of this fight the ceo woman ends up hanging out

the window cat woman's going to help her back up but then she sees her reflection her cracked gross face in the window and decides that death would be better than looking gidious so she just lets herself fall and dies and then of course because she is made of stone when she hits the ground yeah she breaks she shatters like a shatter of rocks yes that's what happened that's how i remember it but no that's not what happens it's such a strange mandela effect she doesn't break at the end of this movie no she's just dead she's just laying there yeah they even show the close-up above her face. Her face is cracked, just like we saw it during the fight, but she's not exploded everywhere. Yeah. Listeners, Torvald and I both remember the movie happening this way. The villain cracks into a thousand pieces at the end when she hits the ground. And I guess I can only assume our minds made that up because it would make sense, but it doesn't happen. So if

you listeners remember this movie ending with the villain cracking into a thousand pieces when she falls on the ground when she hits let us know to talk to us oh yeah on the floor let us know talk to us on twitter um because i'd like to know if anyone else remembers that because it was crazy to me when i got to the end of this movie and yeah one of the scenes i remembered most and liked the most from this movie like the coolest shot was the main villain cracking into lots of different it doesn't happen 100 my brain just made it up the best part of the movie well and we both made it up like individually like because we've we've never discussed this movie before now you and i like we have no reason to we don't even like this movie pretty cool great ending and then catwoman instead of getting together with the policeman she just walks away towards the moon where is she going my theory is that she did finally commit suicide because at the end she leaves a note for

her loved ones and then disappears yes i don't know how else to interpret that with all the other evidence where she's climbing on the building we have a handwriting expert saying she has split personalities she's got these weird mood swings yeah if it's i asked michael ferris about that theory and and here's what he said i like that i don't think i i think i don't got anything for you there but i'd be willing to buy that you know i mean i'd be willing to buy that all superheroes supervillains are just they almost all fit that profile so so michael ferris talked to us about accepting the razzie award and here's what he had to say anytime you're involved in a project where they bring in like a shit ton of other writers you're probably going to wind up with a sole credit because they're just going to divide the pie up so much and that's why we have sole credit on cat woman i don't know why i always think cat woman the credit i should be trying to bury but

i actually went and accepted my golden raspberry for that i've heard that and then my original thought was to read off the list of the 27 other writers who've been i would like to thank at least a few of these people will never forgive me if i do that so oh that would have been fun hallie berry famously or infamously did go and accept her award and apologized for being in Catwoman. Oh, Halle Berry. I mean, you know, I gotta, you gotta give respect to Halle Berry and Michael Ferris for actually attending the Razzies and accepting the award. Good on them. You know, I think it's great that they can have a good sense of humor and you know, it's a humble thing to do. Yes. Well, I think that's it. I think we said all we have to say. What do you think about the theory that Patience Phillips was just a crazy person? Yeah, well, so if we look at this movie as if it was a movie that does not have any magic in it, then yes, she's just a crazy person, right?

Like, if there's no magic, then no, she did not become a super-powered Catwoman, and yes, she is insane. Now, was she actually suicidal, and did she have multiple personalities? Well, yeah, there's a lot of evidence for that. She was suicidal. She went out on the ledge and kept snapping in between her timid patience personality and her gruff, commanding Catwoman personality. How about the other theory? What do you think? Are there multiple Catwoman? And are they all imbued with the powers of an ancient Egyptian cat god? I mean, according to Catwoman, yes, that's what exactly what they say. It has to be, yes. Obviously, it was designed to fit in with Batman Returns. And despite what people involved may say, it clearly, they have Michelle Pfeiffer's face. You can't argue that. She's one of the Catwoman. Yeah, they put her in the movie. She's There. Did the villain of Catwoman 2004 break into a thousand pieces in the original end of this movie as it was shown in theaters?

I mean, you know what I think, but this is something that only our listeners can answer. Does anyone else remember? Did anyone else see that in theaters? I legitimately want to know. I'm surprised we did. Dude, it was the new Catwoman movie. Of course we saw it in theaters. We were so pumped for Catwoman. We were the target audience. Pretty much, yeah. I mean... Write to us on @popcornisn'treal and let us know. If you liked this episode, make sure you leave a review, rate, subscribe. Let your friends know. Tell everybody. You can also find us on YouTube. Music for this episode was provided by Christine. Play us out, Michael Ferris. And remember, the popcorn isn't real.