First ‘Catwoman’ screenplay included tiger fight, army of rats (exclusive)

Before growing into a campy cult favorite in the streaming era, Halle Berry’s 2004 blockbuster Catwoman came and went as a monumental flop in the superhero genre. Now, 20 years later, Entertainment Weekly has obtained original script pages that were cat-scratched from the final version and tease what could’ve been a very different (and even wilder) story.

Speaking exclusively to EW for an oral history in celebration of the Pitof-directed film’s 20th anniversary, writer John Brancato — who boarded the long-gestating film in the early aughts alongside his fellow The Game writer Michael Ferris — tells us that the pair’s first draft had more fleshed-out themes related to toxic beauty standards for women. That and, uh, a fight scene involving a tiger, a villain’s latex face melting off, and a climax that saw Catwoman corralling her city’s kitty population to ward off an army of rats carrying the bubonic plague.

“There were a lot of things in [our initial draft] that I liked. One of the things it played a lot with was images of beauty and the fact that women are sold this bill of goods of having to look good all the time and wear makeup,” Brancato recalls of the script, which is dated Aug. 6, 2002, and was written with explicit directions from the studio not to set the film in the Batman universe, he says.

The story’s bones are similar to the film that hit theaters two years later on July 23, 2004. It follows a young woman, Patience (Berry), who works for a cosmetics brand that’s about to unveil a poison face cream, is murdered and revived as Catwoman by a mystic feline collective, falls for police investigator Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt), and clashes with Laurel (Sharon Stone), the narcissistic supermodel spouse of her company’s conniving CEO. That’s where the similarities end, though, as what happens between those beats drastically differs from the final movie’s plot.

“It lost a lot of its social context [by the time of production], which is what had been appealing from the outset for me,” Brancato recalls, adding that the finished version “doesn’t have the sharpness of how that beauty culture is toxic for its victims.” He speculates this is due to the studio’s alleged insistence on rewriting the story with so many different scribes. He also alleges that he and Ferris were fired from production twice before cameras rolled.

“At the time, Botox was relatively new, so the idea of a cosmetic based on the bubonic plague seemed like a funny idea. We focused on what it’d feel like to be a shy, retiring, bookish person with an alter-ego, a Jekyll and Hyde story of this sexually forward, aggressive, violent person, with the two at war with each other,” Brancato says. “The power that controlled the movie was studio executives. Everything came from them — specifically Jeff Robinov, who was [the motion picture head at] Warner Bros. After we’d done a draft, he put everything on index cards, called us to his office, and on a giant whiteboard, rearranged the script. ‘Move this here, get rid of this idea of rats — we don’t like rats — get rid of her internal process of becoming a cat.’ He tossed everything I thought was good in our earlier work. We had an oddly cobbled-together version of the script.”

Among the wilder moments in Brancato and Ferris’ original script is Berry’s final battle with Stone aboard a yacht. Similar to how it unfolds in the 2004 version, it’s uncovered that Laurel is also a victim of the beauty brand’s toxic formula that’s about to hit store shelves. But in Brancato and Ferris’ original version, this is revealed when Laurel gets precariously close to flames that break out on the boat, causing her false latex mask to slowly melt off her face, revealing blemishes and blisters from the company’s prized cream. In the 2004 version, the reveal comes when Laurel’s titanium-strength face cracks from the force of Catwoman’s claws.

Berry tells EW she was hesitant about the storyline but didn’t speak up at the time.

“I always thought the idea of Catwoman saving women from a face cream felt a bit soft. All the other superheroes save the world; they don’t just save women from cracked faces. I always knew that was a soft superhero plight, but at that time in my career, I didn’t have the agency I have today or belief that I could challenge that,” she explains. “So, I went along with it.”

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Another over-the-top moment from Brancato and Ferris’ draft included a major sequence involving the company’s lab rats escaping into the city’s public domains. After Laurel sets off an explosion at the brand’s manufacturing plant, the script notes that there would’ve been several whacky scenes chronicling the invasion of bubonic plague-infected rats.

“A RAT tumbles from the awning above, SPLASHING into a woman’s BOWL OF SOUP. She lets out a scream. Moments later, PANIC erupts, PATRONS FLEE as MORE RATS shower down from above,” the screenplay reads. Moments later, it describes Catwoman coming to the rescue after wrangling local felines locked away in an animal shelter.

“CATWOMAN bypasses BARKING DOGS, hissing at them as she does. She turns a corner and finds–DOZENS OF CATS behind bars. CATWOMAN flings the cages open, the grateful CATS stream out,” Brancato and Ferris write before an intended shot outlines that “THE ARMY OF CATS pours through the open doors” of a convenience store in pursuit of the terroristic rodents.

While Brancato and Ferris came to the screenplay after producer Denise Di Novi had worked with several writers (including Theresa Rebeck, Kate Kondell, and John Rogers) on different concepts following the release of 1992’s Batman Returns, the writer feels that the story bears resemblance to many of those who came before him.

“It’s hard to say anybody wrote that screenplay,” he says, pointing to all the different takes that made it into the movie. “The campiness of it, the oddity of it [appeals today]. It’s an odd piece, the fact that it was such a strange mess.”

EW has reached out to Warner Bros., Robinov, Rebeck, Rogers, and Ferris for comment.

Read EW’s full oral history of Catwoman with Berry, director Pitof, producer Di Novi, and screenwriter Brancato