Monday Box Office Special Edition: Catwoman In Perspective
To fully appreciate the performance of the film that Roger Ebert called "unbelievably bad" and "truly bad," resident statistician Andrew Krucoff puts Catwoman's box office numbers in historical perspective with his chart.In addition to finishing a distant third in its first weekend of release, it had only the fourth-best opening of any "cat" movie in recent history, and the competition isn't exactly fierce; Mike Myers' reviled The Cat in the Hat and Fox's Reagan-defiling Garfield both put Halle Berry's light S&M feline offering in a burlap sack and tossed it off a bridge.
In celebration of Variety's inspired turn of phrase, "arcane pussy power," our stats team researched the appearance of the word "pussy" in four leading publications (our definition of "leading" was loose, to be sure), according to Nexis searches. Conclusion, utilizing a tired personification of a newspaper and an easy lesbian joke: The Gray Lady does love her some "pussy."
If we haven't force-fed you enough data, you can take a look at this chart tracking the skyrocketing popularity of the phrase "catwoman bad buzz" in Google search results. There are just so many ways to say "big fucking stinker" with numbers! Poor Halle Berry's going to need another Monster's Ball role to set her reputation back on track, i.e., one where she cries and takes off her clothes every five minutes. All the way off, no more of this career-killing, PG-13, pleather nonsense. We're sure Billy Bob can whip something up before she winds up in an Old Navy commercial, purring and pawing at a value-priced mock turtleneck.
[Again, thanks to graphics savant Chris Gage for prettying up these numbers.]