The 2020 Razzie-nominated flop Geena Davis pitched herself to star in: “I’m available”
There’s no way for an actor to guess how a movie will be received before critics and audiences have a chance to see it for themselves, but Geena Davis still dodged a bullet when her pleas to bag a role in a box office flop fell on deaf ears.
The Academy Award winner hasn’t been a big-screen fixture over the last decade, only amassing half a dozen feature-length credits, but it would have at least given her an experience that she hasn’t tasted for a long time: appearing in a big-budget blockbuster, although that hasn’t gone too well in the past.
The back-to-back bombings of Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight in the mid-1990s severely dented Davis’ star power, with the former losing so much money that it hammered the final nail into Carolco’s coffin, but the latter is a damn good picture, with the star regarding it as a personal favourite.
Those two films were also released when she was on the cusp of hitting 40, and by her own admission, that was the moment that Hollywood lost interest in her. She was hardly the first actor to feel that way, but as much as her workload has been scaled back in recent years, Davis has been keeping herself busy in other, more important ways as the brains behind the Geena Davis Institute.
She was a much better action hero than she got credit for, so it’s easy to see why she’d be keen to throw her hat into the ring for what would have been her first ass-kicking role in a long time. Unfortunately, nobody wanted to take her up on the offer, which might have been a blessing in disguise.
In 2017, Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman single-handedly undid the damage caused by the double-pronged debacle of Halle Berry’s Catwoman and Jennifer Garner’s Elektra to prove that comic book adaptations with a female lead could do big business in cinemas. $824 million in business, to be exact, and it was the highest-grossing movie solo directed by a woman until Greta Gerwig’s Barbie came along.
Naturally, Gal Gadot’s title character returned for a sequel, but a combination of the pandemic ravaging the theatrical industry and a simultaneous release on HBO Max crippled Wonder Woman 1984‘s commercial prospects, and the follow-up failed to recoup its hefty $200 million budget. Shortly after the opener had smashed records, though, Davis revealed that she wanted in.
“Certainly, Wonder Woman needed to be made, and I’m so beyond thrilled with how it came out,” she explained. “I met Patty Jenkins, and I told her, ‘I’m sure you’re going to make a sequel, and if you need anybody Amazonian, there’s always me. I’m available.'”
Obviously, it didn’t come to pass, and with Wonder Woman 1984 earning a pair of Razzie nominations, including one for ‘Worst Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel’, perhaps it’s for the best that Davis was left on the outside looking in.
