The atrocious movie Jennifer Garner was forced into making: “It was in her contract”
In the early years of the 21st century, Jennifer Garner was being heralded as a major Hollywood star in waiting, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out why.
Her breakthrough performance as Sydney Bristow in the TV series Alias won her a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award, and by the end of the show’s run, she’d notched four nods apiece from the Globes and the Primetime Emmys and three from SAG.
As well as giving her the chance to showcase her dramatic chops, Alias showed that Garner was no slouch in the action department, either. As a heightened spy thriller, almost every episode required her to kick somebody’s ass, and her mastery of the stunts and set pieces impressed one particularly famous co-star.
Having guest starred in the show, Quentin Tarantino was amazed that she could so effortlessly handle the fights and explosions while “doing all this dramatic stuff,” telling the actor that she didn’t “have to prove nothing to nobody” because she was more than talented enough to “work forever.”
As has been the case for any rising star for the last two and a half decades, it wasn’t long before the superhero genre came calling. At the height of Alias‘ popularity, Garner was drafted in to play Elektra Natchios opposite Ben Affleck’s Matt Murdock in 2003’s Daredevil, a decision both of them would come to regret.
Whereas Affleck hated the movie and repeatedly trashed it in public, Garner’s fate was arguably worse. When she signed her contract for the Marvel Comics adaptation, it gave the studio the right to make a solo spinoff for her character. That’s exactly what 20th Century Fox did, and the results were disastrous.
Rob Bowman’s Elektra bombed at the box office, was torn apart by critics, and, along with Halle Berry’s Catwoman, was pinpointed as the reason why Hollywood was so reluctant to make any blockbuster superhero flick with a female lead for over a decade until Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman arrived.
Garner’s Alias co-star Michael Vartan confirmed that “she had to do it because of Daredevil” and that there was no way out of Elektra because “it was in her contract.” Anyone who’d seen the show was fully aware that the lead had the potential to become an established action hero on the big screen, only for one shitty movie to kill that idea in an instant.
In fact, Garner wouldn’t take top billing in another actioner until 2018’s revenge thriller Peppermint, and it can’t be a coincidence that Elektra helped swear her off the genre for so long. It may not have killed her career outright, but neither can it be denied that the lingering stench of her contractually obligated flop effectively robbed her of the chance to continue cashing cheques and breaking necks on the silver screen.
