The cancelled Halle Berry movie the world wasn’t ready for: “It was ahead of its time”
Having already made history at the turn of the 21st century, Halle Berry was all-in and fully committed to doing it again until a nervous studio pulled the plug on a movie that had the potential to change the face of cinema in more ways than one.
Not only that but there was a clear knock-on effect that did more harm than good to both the star and the change she was lobbying to make in the first place, while the overarching impetus behind the project has continued to be a relevant and unsavoury concern for more than 20 years.
Seeking something more light-hearted and escapist following her heart-wrenching turn in Monster’s Ball, Berry signed on to tackle one of blockbuster cinema’s most one-dimensional recurring tropes when she was cast as Giacinta ‘Jinx’ Johnson in Die Another Day, Pierce Brosnan’s fourth and final outing as James Bond.
Two months after production began in January 2002, Berry etched her name into cinema’s history books when she became the first African-American woman to win an Academy Award for ‘Best Actress’. She’d reached the very pinnacle of the industry, but there were more doors she wanted to kick down for others to walk through.
When Die Another Day became the highest-grossing Bond flick ever, plans were afoot for Berry to headline a solo spinoff with Stephen Frears hired to direct, while Michael Madsen would reprise his Die Another Day role as Jinx’s boss Damian Falco and Javier Bardem was attached to play the love interest.
It was the first time franchise stewards Michael G Wilson and Barbara Broccoli had ever allowed 007 to spawn a canonical movie or TV series that didn’t revolve around the iconic secret agent, which was a massive show of confidence in not just Berry but her ability to anchor a crowd-pleasing action spectacular.
However, studio MGM was put off by the hefty $80million price tag, with Berry maintaining her belief that the top-level executives in Tinseltown simply weren’t ready to pull that particular trigger. “It was very disappointing,” she admitted to Variety. “It was ahead of its time. Nobody was ready to sink that kind of money into a Black female action star. They just weren’t sure of its value. That’s where we were then.”
The underwhelming box office returns of female-fronted actioners like Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider – The Cradle of Life further dissuaded the biggest outfits in the business from backing expensive movies with women taking centre stage, but Berry decided to try her luck again with disastrous results.
She did at least get her wish to take top billing in an expensive mainstream picture, but Catwoman was a horrendous miscalculation. It was the costliest action-orientated movie to ever feature a woman in the lead role at the time, but the $100m comic book adaptation bombed thunderously and earned Berry a Razzie for ‘Worst Actress’, which she was at least gracious enough to collect in person.
Unfortunately, one of the reverberations that rippled throughout the corridors of power was that because it lost a fortune – as did Jennifer Garner’s Daredevil spinoff Elektra – the studios assumed that audiences weren’t interested in female-led superhero movies. Catwoman tanked, but it remained the highest-grossing comic book film with a woman in the lead for almost a decade and a half until Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman came along, which says it all.
There was a clear, obvious, and massively detrimental knock-on effect from Jinx falling apart to Catwoman cratering the concept of women being given their fair share of the spotlight in the superhero genre, all because Berry was quite rightly trying to prove herself as a viable and bankable commodity in a male-dominated arena.
However, recent history suggests that a vocal minority of Bond fans definitely wouldn’t have accepted the Jinx movie two decades ago because they can barely contemplate it now. Lashana Lynch was subjected to horrendous online abuse when it was revealed that her character Nomi in No Time to Die had taken on the 007 mantle after Daniel Craig’s agent retired.
She wasn’t taking over the franchise; she was only the fourth-billed name in the cast, and at no point was it even remotely intimated that Lynch was going to shove Craig out of the spotlight and become the new 007 on a permanent basis, but the mere suggestion was enough to open the floodgates to an abhorrent amount of vitriol stemming from something as innocuous as three digits associated with an entirely fictional man being bestowed upon somebody else, one who just so happened to be a Black woman.
If that’s what unfolded in 2021, then it doesn’t even bear thinking about what those militant gatekeepers of Bond lore would have to say for themselves were Berry to take centre stage in the franchise’s first-ever official entry that wasn’t a Bond-focused story in the early 2000s.
The Oscar winner was adamant that Hollywood wasn’t ready for Jinx back then, and as sad as it is to say, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest some people aren’t even ready for it now.
