Jennifer Garner thought Marvel’s ‘Elektra’ was “awful”
The Marvel cinematic universe might be a movie juggernaut in contemporary cinema, but back at the dawn of the new century, the series was still trying to find its feet. Whilst it found early success with Bryan Singer’s X-Men trilogy and Sam Raimi’s wildly popular Spider-Man movies, the rest of the infant MCU was a scattered mess, featuring Universal’s Hulk, Lionsgate’s Punisher and 20th Century Fox’s Elektra, starring Jennifer Garner.
A spin-off of the comparatively well-received 2003 movie Daredevil, the 2005 Rob Bowman movie Elektra is recognised as one of the worst movies in the early Marvel canon. Featuring Garner in the titular role, the film follows the assassin-for-hire and her efforts to protect her targets, a single father and his young daughter, from the supernatural threat of several deadly killers.
With a strange and overly perplexing plot, Elektra failed to gain any commercial or critical praise upon its release and struggles to this day to find cult success in a cinematic universe that teems with fans. Failing to make its budget back, the film earned $57 million at the box office, a measly sum in comparison to the rest of the early franchise, and the Elektra character was dumped on the cutting room floor.
Garner suffered, too. Following the release of the movie, she failed to reach the heights of her success in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In fact, according to actor Michael Vartan, who briefly dated Garner decades ago, the Elektra actor wasn’t all too proud of her work in the movie. Speaking in an interview with US Weekly, Vartan recalled, “I heard [Elektra] was awful. [Jennifer] called me and told me it was awful…She had to do it because of Daredevil. It was in her contract”.
Despite the failure of the spin-off standalone Elektra movie, the character was still teeming with potential, especially considering that she had impressed in the 2003 Daredevil film with Ben Affleck. You can’t help but think if Elektra had only been released a decade later, then it would have been given the full MCU treatment, with a fully-fleshed out story and respectable characterisation, akin to Scarlett Johansson in Black Widow or Brie Larson in Captain Marvel.
Garner spoke about her disappointment that Elektra never got the same treatment, telling The Hollywood Reporter, “It’s such a shame, honestly, because once Kevin took over everything there was elevated: the writing, the direction, the comedy inside of the stories they were telling…And I did not have that experience”.
Without the necessary treatment, Elektra certainly doesn’t stand the test of time, being comparable to the Halle Berry disaster Catwoman, ranking low down on the best female-led superhero movies of all time. For the record, we’d rank the Gal Gadot-led DC movie Wonder Woman as our favourite, though we’d give a special shout-out to the idiosyncratic Margot Robbie/Harley Quinn movie Birds of Prey too.
