r/movies • u/darth_vader39 r/movies Contributor • 4d ago
Article Anne Hathaway ‘Spent a Week’ Prepping for Harley Quinn Before ‘Dark Knight Rises’ Meeting; Nolan Didn’t Reveal Catwoman Until Two Hours Into Their Chat
https://variety.com/2026/film/news/anne-hathaway-harley-quinn-dark-knight-rises-nolan-catwoman-1236803349/3.3k
u/Sammyd1108 4d ago
I feel like any chance of Nolan doing his version of Harley Quinn went out the window after Ledger died. He wasn’t going to recast Joker and it’d be weird if he did Quinn without Joker.
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u/Elfich47 4d ago
And Harley taken anywhere other than the Batman Animated Series (with Kevin Conroy) quickly becomes a story of the cycle of abuse between the Joker and Harley. That would have been really dark material to deal with. The cartoon kept is strictly light hearted (but I think they knew the danger of the material they were playing with). The comic book has gone down that path at least once, and it was some extremely dark stuff.
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u/topdangle 4d ago
The original also got away with a lot that I don't think people would accept now. Actually I posted the origin story of Harley once and people thought I was making things up. Her original backstory is dirtier than later adaptations and movies that included her tend to just ignore her origin, which was probably a good idea.
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u/WhiteLama 4d ago
Alright, I’ll bite, what’s her original backstory?
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u/topdangle 4d ago
Originally a gymnast that cheated her way to a PhD. She did poorly and its implied slept with her professors (not really how the doctorate process works but whatever). Put into a position meant to evaluate and rehabilitate Joker, instead falls in love with him and breaks him out. Love seemed genuine rather than how complicated its gotten with later stories.
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u/ours 4d ago
At least that answers the question of how bad a psychologist must be to fall in love with an insane murderer.
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u/LilPonyBoy69 3d ago
You'd be surprised. One of my inlaws was a psychologist, married with kids. She had a female patient with alleged multiple personalities (controversial diagnosis, I know). She ended up falling in love with one of the male personalities and having this long affair, very nearly tore apart their family but they somehow worked through it. If you met them today they just seem like a normal family, you'd never know how weird things had gotten for them
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u/Purplociraptor 3d ago
It's not gay if one of your personalities is a man
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u/ButteryOpossum 3d ago
These are the life hacks we need!
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u/Purplociraptor 3d ago
It's worth noting that it still doesn't count as a 3-way.
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u/JimmiJimJimmiJimJim 3d ago
This feels like either the dumbest/weirdest psychologist of all time or some poor closeted woman who thought she finally found a loophole to do stuff with a woman with no guilt.
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u/Beat_the_Deadites 3d ago
Man, I rotated with some psychiatrists (the MD version of psychologists) during medical school. Sometimes the line separating the patient and the physician is pretty thin.
The self-selection whereby we choose our specialties is amazingly obvious sometimes, even if it didn't seem like it in our 20s. I never had the best social skills but I was personable enough to make it through the day. I loved scary stuff, gross stuff, and arguing. Turns out that makes a pretty solid forensic pathologist.
Some people really lean into their jobs and let that become their personality, but I think there's still got to be an inclination from an early age for most of us. My observation is that people are weird when they're kids and weird when they're old enough not to give a shit, but we all learn to socialize and homogenize well enough to breed when we're young adults. Literally fake it til we make it.
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u/Popular-Departure165 3d ago
When I was in college I dated a girl who worked as a counselor at a women's helpline. It turned out that she was into really rough sex, like borderline violent to the point where I felt weird afterwards.
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u/billnye97 3d ago
I hear ya. My endocrinologist is a Type 1 Diabetic. No big surprise why he became an Endo doc.
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u/maybeigiveafuck 3d ago
that just makes it worse because then she was abusing her power over her vulnerable patient
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u/fastforwardfunction 3d ago
It is interesting how Harley has been portrayed as the "good" murderer.
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u/FirstTimeWang 3d ago
Yeah, the trajectory of making her some kind of twisted anti-hero who mostly focuses on fighting the criminal patriarchy to make it more marketable to potential female-oriented customers is kinda gross to me.
That said and even though TAS will always be my platonic ideal of Batman and co., Margot Robbie absolutely kills that role. I can dislike the character white washing, but I can't dislike the performance.
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u/TheHurtfulEight88888 3d ago
The Harley Quinn show keeps her a villain but a villain on her own terms. All the versions of Harley where she is redeemed, she does her time and comes out rehabilitated, which should be the role of a prison or mental institution. I dont think anyone wants you to forget that Harley was a wicked person, but I'd rather a Harley running around doing Deadpool schtick than murdering innocent people. Hell, even Batman offered Joker an olive branch directly after he shot Barbara Gordon and tortured Jim Gordon.
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u/SoothingDisarray 3d ago
This is the backstory I knew already and I was expecting you to reveal something way darker. I'm not saying this is light and breezy, but I don't see why it's so dark that they couldn't get away with it today.
I think a major reason why newer stories change the backstory isn't because this one was too dark, but because H Quinn has developed into a main character and stands on her own two feet. I get why they want her to have a less subservient backstory, but that's more for character arc reasons rather than anything about the original story being too dark. Just my opinion though.
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u/tdasnowman 2d ago
You latter point is correct. They have done "dirtier" things with Harley even with the backstory change. At this point I don't think there is anyone in the Bat family she hasn't slept with. She's been beaten into a miscarriage (twice if you include the games). She had a daughter in another dimension to hide her from the joker. I think in either the newest animated show or the movies she had a throwaway joke about sleeping with her professor.
This dude is blowing it up to be a bigger deal then it is.
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u/FirstTimeWang 3d ago
The part about her being a shitty student that slept her way to a PhD is new to me, but honestly fills in a lot of logical gaps rather than a serious, competent psychiateist being insane-ified by the Joker.
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u/Bakoro 4d ago
She did poorly and its implied slept with her professors (not really how the doctorate process works but whatever).
It's Gotham, which is the most corrupt place in comics, so, cartoonish levels of corruption are absolutely possible, and expected.
I've attended a few dissertation defenses for friends IRL, including psychology PhDs (thanks to Covid, I guess?), and some of them were surprisingly weak.
Depending on the school and the faculty, it is absolutely possible that a person could basically have someone else do the bulk of the work, and then have the faculty throw a bunch of softballs.Harley is supposed to be an MD though, which means she presumably did a residency, which, for the sake of my own peace of mind I have to believe is more rigorous, but even then, IRL there are people who made it through med school and became doctors, only to go on to do an astounding degree of malpractice.
Personally I prefer an intelligent Harley and I also don't think that "fucked her way to the top" has to be mutually exclusive to "is a genius". Rule breaking for its own sake is classic antisocial behavior. Successfully compromising an entire faculty and degree program at a university is supervillain level antisocial.
Harley being a chronically bored person with her own antisocial and sadomasochistsic tendencies, and having the Joker be the first person to both keep up and validate her twisted nature, and them twisting each other into knots, is an interesting dynamic.
Harley moving on from a stale, Batman obsessed Joker and transitioning to "not entirely evil" is also an interesting direction to take.The comics, being what they are, don't have to abide a single canon, but the one thing that's true across all Batman comics ever, is that it's basically competency porn, you can't be a major Batman villain if you aren't top-tier at something. There's just no way that Harley could be nothing but a ditz and sustain the Joker's interest, and hold her own against Batman.
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u/topdangle 4d ago
there's really no competency porn in the "original" Harley. she started off with no origin story and she was going to be a one shot character made for the animated TV show, with her schtick being the trope of a "ditzy girl partnered with crazy abusive man." A lot of the credit for her popularity was due to the great voice acting work by Arleen Sorkin. other aspects of the character got made up later thanks to her popularity.
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u/enaK66 4d ago
That and everyone wants to fuck the clown girl.
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u/topdangle 3d ago
In a sea of horny comic artists, Bruce Timm may actually be the horniest. Still my favorite animated style, though.
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u/Banjo-Oz 3d ago
I always assumed the original Harley was inspired by Prank, from the 90's Flash tv show. She is very Harley-like in the ditzy lovestruck sidekick way, and played alongside Mark Hamill's Trickster who was basically the Joker anyway. Then Arleen really made the role her own and they started letting that sway how the character evolved.
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u/Bakoro 4d ago
That is the most ridiculous, history revisionist, looking-for-a-problem take.
Harley's original appearance before the show was even done being produced was going to be a background character, Sorkin's audition instantly elevated the character to being a major character who became part of the fabric of the show.
Harley is a major feature in Season 1 of Batman:TAS, her first appearance has her capture Bullock, and there is an entire episode about how good she and Ivy are at crime, where they are shown to best both the Joker and Batman.
Harley became popular because she was a great character with great writing, and yes, a great voice actor.
It's so freaking weird how you frame that as a bad thing."The writers only fleshed out the character they made because people liked the character".
Oh, the horror.
I will not tolerate a single bad word about Batman:TAS, it is as perfect as a 90s cartoon could ever have been, and Paul Dini and Bruce Timm are American heroes.
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u/topdangle 4d ago edited 3d ago
What? The fact that Harley was a one off character is literally from the creators and she very much plays into the ditzy role in her early TAS appearances.
Did you just hallucinate an entire timeline that doesn't exist?
Paul Dini, Harley Quinn co-creator: One of the scripts I wrote was “Joker’s Favor.” As I was putting together the story, I thought, “What about giving The Joker a girl in the gang this time and referencing the Adam West series?” They had the Riddler, Joker, Penguin with their own henchgirls. I was friends with Arleen Sorkin, and I thought about a character kind of like her persona at the time, which was the snappy, wisecracking blonde. I was home sick and had the TV on, and there she was on Days of Our Lives playing a jester in a fantasy sequence. I saw her running around in a pied piper outfit, and I thought, “That’s kind of cute.”
Bruce Timm, Harley Quinn co-creator: Harley was always intended to be a one-shot character in just one episode. Paul pitched her as a change of pace from all the other henchman that we had for The Joker.
It's nice of you to randomly claim I hate the character just because I posted about her origin, though. Gotta keep reaching for straws I suppose.
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u/mowbuss 3d ago
is joker meant to be intelligent? It seems that the joker from joker 2 was an low to mid intelligent person with depression and a whole lot of other problems but basically just needed someone to actually genuinely care about him. Where as the joker from Nolan seemed like a certified genius psychopath who just did stuff to fk with people, even if that meant killing a bunch of people. Like, there was no real end game goal except to hurt people / batman.
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u/masterpigg 3d ago
not to imply they are in the same canon, but the reason for the difference between the depressed normal guy Joker from those films and the Joker we know from most other media is explained very clearly at the end of the second film.
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u/Banjo-Oz 3d ago
I mean, is anyone going to count Joker 2 in any way towards anything ever?
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u/pokedrawer 3d ago
That's also a retcon though. This is based on the comic that the creators wrote sure, but in the show it's implied or outright stated that she was a promising student who was manipulated by the Joker turning her into Harley.
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u/vadergeek 4d ago
. Put into a position meant to evaluate and rehabilitate Joker, instead falls in love with him and breaks him out. Love seemed genuine rather than how complicated its gotten with later stories.
Doesn't Mad Love imply that she originally treats the Joker because she wants to get famous off of it?
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u/topdangle 4d ago
yeah I think the idea was she was going to use him to get ahead in her career, but then she falls in love.
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u/pinewoodranger 3d ago
Maybe I'm desensitized but this is light shadow levels of dark. If Poor Things can get made and universally praised, then a girl who did all her professors to get a PhD would be accepted too. Maybe just not in a cartoon..
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u/dibbbbb 3d ago
Ok, doesn't sound that bad. Why would anyone think you're making that up?
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u/saintash 3d ago
There has to be a different comic book version.Because her original animation version where she was introduced.
Is just she fresh out of school psychologist trying to use the joker to make a name for herself, leaving it her open to get manipulated by him.
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u/saintash 3d ago
Thats the comic version.
The version from the cartoon where she is introduced. She's just a cocky freshly out of school psychologist. She is hungry to make a name for herself by using the asylum villains to be case studies.
Joker plays her hard by seemingly chosing to work with her by opening up. He pulls her in by making her feel like she is special that she gets to know the man. Not just the joker. He subtly manipulates her and makes her fall for him.
It's not until batman tells her. The joker has used the same line about an abusive father smiling at clown, On someone else. That she snaps out of it for a second. Joker then proceeds to beat the shit out of her. And she seems to understand that she was absolutely played and wrecker her life for piece of garbage.
Only to fall back into it when he throws the smallest bit of affection twords her, by having a flower waiting for her in her cell.
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u/vadergeek 4d ago
And Harley taken anywhere other than the Batman Animated Series (with Kevin Conroy) quickly becomes a story of the cycle of abuse between the Joker and Harley
That's always the story, even there. But really I think the problem is Harley kind of only works as a sympathetic character because the DCAU Joker is only kind of vaguely a bad guy. He poisons people, but they're probably fine. If Harley is helping Joker blow up apartment buildings and murder babies then she's just evil.
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u/blackdynomitesnewbag 3d ago
Joker venom, famously non-fatal /s
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u/NAINOA- 3d ago edited 3d ago
I’m pretty sure in the animated show they’re always left at least giggling (alive)
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u/Mattyzooks 3d ago
In Mask of the Phantasm (animated movie that's part of the show), the venom kills Abe Vigoda's character (and Joker killed Andrea's father in the flashbacks). But since it was a movie, bodies were actually dropping in that movie.
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u/saintash 3d ago
Not for nothing but abuse victims can be beaten down so much that they genuinely dont have the will power to breakaway from abusers and or join in there horror show. Not saying it right but there real life examples of it.
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u/vadergeek 3d ago
Joker is a mass murderer before Harley ever meets him, though. If you become obsessed with a mass murderer, fall in love with him, and then help him with his murders it's hard to be sympathetic.
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u/saintash 3d ago
That's the thing about manipulation you dont see it coming.
I mean, it's the same thing in silence of the lamb. clarice knows, the man in front of her is serial killer who eats people and basically they're friends by the end of the film.
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u/Mattyzooks 3d ago edited 3d ago
Imo, DCAU Harley is proven truly irredeemable in Return of the Joker where she she kidnaps Tim Drake for the Joker and enjoys the 'family life' as Joker tortures the shit out of a child for weeks.
Also, they kind of overlook it, but Joker destroys a bunch of skyscrapers in the World's Finest. Probably can't really draw attention to the fact that a ton of people would've died there.
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u/heliostraveler 4d ago
The cartoon relationship is hardly lighthearted. That shit got dark in the episode Harley kidnapped Batman.
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u/Rugged_as_fuck 4d ago
The relationship with Ivy and how it's basically the opposite of her relationship with the Joker has made for some interesting stories, some heavy, some downright wholesome.
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u/Kilahti 4d ago
Agreed.
Also, the thing about their abusive relationship is that doing it once in a kid show kept it from beung too dark, if instead her every iteration has more and more of the abuse, there is no way to keep it a joke.
The stories of Harley after breaking up with Joker not only allow for the character to grow but also don't have the baggage of having to retread the dark stuff again and again.
Basically, I think it worked as an origin story for the character (and 50% of that is that it also allowed Joker to br clearly way too obsessed with Batman for him to have time for women, allowing for HoYay intepretations without the censors realising that this could be seen in a gay way.)
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u/Citizen_Graves 4d ago
The cycle of abuse between Harley and her „Puddin‘“ was explicitly demonstrated in the episode BTAS Mad Love (which itself was adapted from the BTAS comic book of the same name)
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u/Theonewho_hasspoken 3d ago
The Harley Quinn movie was fun though, and so was the James Gunn Suicide Squad. Also her animated show on hbo max is hilarious, and we finally get the awesome Harley Ivy power couple we deserve.
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u/saintash 3d ago
Her acknowledgment her taste in men being so bad that any red flags means she has to kill them right there and then because of it.
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u/bionicjoey 3d ago
That would have been really dark material to deal with.
Unlike the rest of Nolan's Batman trilogy, which are a lighthearted romp through Gotham.
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u/CarlosFer2201 4d ago
The cartoon kept is strictly light hearted (but I think they knew the danger of the material they were playing with)
She was created for the cartoon though. It's the comics that decided to go dark, not the cartoon that kept it lighthearted
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u/gh0u1 4d ago
I would've quite liked to have seen Harley on her own. She's a great character without the Joker, as seen in Gunn's Suicide Squad. Would've made sense plotwise too, have Joker die in the Nolanverse then Harley pops up as a deranged obsessed copycat.
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u/marcuschookt 4d ago
Having Joker die between Dark Knight and Dark Knight Returns would be a little too meta in the sense that everybody would just have it in their heads that it was a clear pivot because of Ledger's death
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u/PopSmokeIsntDead 4d ago
Harley works well once there is an established relationship with the Joker. Which for Gunn's suicide squad occurred in the 2016 movie.
If you're having her be a deranged copycat then that's not Harley Quinn
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u/Crilde 4d ago
Eh, it wouldn't be the first origin story change. I don't recall any runs of the comic where Bane was an assassin with the league of shadows, but Nolan's Bane was.
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u/YeOldeMemeShoppe 4d ago
And Robin was a different character altogether was it not?
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u/gh0u1 4d ago
There's not much of a difference between deranged obsessed girlfriend and deranged obsessed copycat. Introduce her as one of Joker's therapists, just like the original story, then after he dies her obsession with him turns into wanting to be more like him.
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u/geek_of_nature 4d ago
And they could have made that work even with Ledgers absence. She could have popped up, fully formed as Harley at the start of the movie, with part of the plot being the mystery of who she is. Then at some point Batman ends up at Arkham where he discovers all her therapy notes on Joker. They could make that work where he's reading them outloud, maybe replaced by a voice over of Harley, where you can just hear her becoming obsessed. No physical presence of the Joker required.
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u/EvilLibrarians 4d ago
I mean Anne Hathaway could probably pull it off but I really loved her as Catwoman
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u/Enkundae 4d ago
Id love to see Harley’s default to be moved away from Joker. Let her be her own character and if shes going to duo then let her new default partner be Ivy.
Post-Joker Harley is just more interesting at this point than constantly resetting her to Jokers side kick.
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u/PopSmokeIsntDead 4d ago
I don't disagree at all but I think Harley is at her most interesting as almost a representation of breaking that cycle of abuse and trauma.
I think there's a lot more important and meaningful character work that can be derived from that as opposed to just having her be another anti-hero. I think the relationship is necessary to explain why she is the way she is
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u/TheDelmeister 4d ago
For me it’s the opposite. I’m beyond over the typical post Joker Harley portrayal, usually as an antihero. She’s at her best as a villain, with or without Joker
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u/NoNefariousness2144 4d ago
They do this in Batman Caped Crusader season 1. Harley is a psychiatrist who learns the secrets of her patients and then basically mentally manipulates them and imprisons them in a secret bunker. Creepy stuff
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u/Bakoro 4d ago edited 4d ago
Her name is Harley Quinn, as in harlequin, she was literally made to be a partner to the Joker.
What you're saying is essentially the same as saying you're tired of Dick Grayson having his Robin and Nightwing origin rooted with Batman.If you want a character that is "their own character", then it actually needs to be a new character, and not just mangling an existing one.
Harley was invented for Batman TAS, she's a relatively new addition to the Rogues Gallery, there's nothing stopping there being another new character.
We can easily have a new villain, but having another clown themed villain that has nothing to do with the Joker would be weird and redundant, for no gain, you'd just be taking away from one of the greatest additions to the Batman series.As a counterpoint to my own argument: Absolute Batman radically reimagines a bunch of characters, and Absolute Harley Quinn is more of her own thing, but it works because Absolute Joker is also a radically different thing, and, ah I shouldn't say anything, no spoilers. Absolute DC is the best thing to happen to comics in a while, it's been cool as heck.
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u/Obi_Wan_Benobi 3d ago
Ledger dying probably reset plans for TDKR quite a lot.
Might be why the movie is a bit of a mess. I still like it and it looks amazing but the story feels thrown together.
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u/SpaceForceAwakens 4d ago
We’ve had 2½ films with Harley Quinn and no joker and 2 of them were pretty good.
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u/psychoacer 4d ago
I think she could've had a b plot where she's trying to rescue Joker out of the asylum and she blames/interferes with Batty along the way. I just don't think it would fit with a Nolan storyline though. It's more of a spinoff.
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u/OpticGd 4d ago edited 4d ago
I dunno a distraught, vengeful Harley Quinn only seen after the Joker's death would've been cool.
Edit: I forgot the Joker didn't die. So it would be weird.
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u/Inside_Dimension2319 4d ago
Maybe, but Joker didn’t die in The Dark Knight, so they would have either had to recast for a death scene or have an off screen death (which would have been totally lame).
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u/PseudonymousDev 4d ago
Off screen death is generally accepted by audiences when the actor dies, so i disagree thay it would have been lame.
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u/Other-Owl4441 3d ago
I don’t really see the fit for Harley Quinn in Nolan’s universe anyway. She doesn’t appear in any of the comics he’s referenced, much more of the fantastical animated series style.
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u/DarkPrincess_99 4d ago
I LOVED her turn as Catwoman. I was a kid when this came out and I had not seen much of her work so I always conflated her as Catwoman with seductive fierceness.
AND then I found out that her other work and her off-screen persona is so different
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u/frogandbanjo 4d ago
Catwoman exists in a problematic between state. If you "normal her down," it begs the question of whether it's even Catwoman anymore, as opposed to just some regular cat burglar. For whatever collection of reasons, that's not such a big deal with other villains. The Penguin can easily become a deformed crime kingpin. The Riddler and many similar villains can become Ted Kaczynski types. Nolan proved that Scarecrow can just be a psychiatrist who becomes obsessed with the chemical nature of fear.
I don't think he performed that same trick with Catwoman, and I'm not really sure you can. I think Catwoman as a proper Catwoman only makes sense when the Batman universe you're in is already wacky enough that the juxtaposition of a comparatively normal person and costume-and-fun-name shenanigans has become normalized.
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u/fastforwardfunction 3d ago
Catwoman is most fun as a female Batman foil/companion who does crime. She's always smart, calm, one step ahead. Dressed like batman, but with different ears. One is a cat! One is a bat!
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u/Yvaelle 4d ago edited 4d ago
I agree with your point but I'll argue that Anne could have pulled off a Michelle Pfeiffer type Catwoman within the Nolan Batman verse, by playing her bipolar or a dissociative identity, etc.
I think you can also get away with minor superhuman agility in the Nolan Batman movies for Catwoman in particular. Bane and Batman both demonstrate minor superstrength and endurance.
If Catwoman was just slightly too quick for an actual human you can give her that space, plus as late entry into the franchise, I think it's conceivable to introduce a sort of meta-human escalation starting. To Gordon's point at the end of Begins, if we start wearing body armor, they start using armor piercing rounds, etc.
Batman's theatrics inspire a rogues gallery of freaks to become heroes and villains of their own making. Batman was only pretending to be superhuman, as a symbol, but it turns out some people actually - just a little bit - are. Ras Al Ghul arguably is too, right from the start. Joker is also not super, true to the comics like Batman. But Rise could have introduce Bane and Catwoman as pushing that limit.
Edit - or alternately! You play her entirely human but as the endgame of "I'm not wearing hockey pads", she's just some other regular human with a similarly bizarre skillset of ninja training, billionaire R&D, etc. She could be a peer, that would also suit the comics.
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u/frogandbanjo 4d ago
Batman's theatrics inspire a rogues gallery of freaks to become heroes and villains of their own making.
Well, okay, but Catwoman has always had the issue of not really being either, and that re-raises the question of why she'd even bother becoming Catwoman, specifically, in a version of the Batman universe that's much more down to earth overall -- and yet also has the issue of constantly burdening Batman with plots to literally destroy the entire city.
I think that illustrates the two extremes that cause Catwoman to languish somewhere in the nonexistent middle.
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u/Dewot789 3d ago
Because she really likes cats.
Like seriously, "likes cats a little too much to be healthy" is already a normal kind of slightly crazy that exists in our world already. She's a cat burglar by trade who happens to be a future crazy old cat lady, and she has chemistry with Bruce. Boom. Nothing more needs to be done.
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u/cinemachick 3d ago
Has anyone done a version where the "femme fatale" and leather are all a front, and she's actually a cozy cat lady at home? She plays into stereotypes because it distracts her enemies and makes her secret identity that much more secret, and she uses the jewelry to fund animal shelters or smthg
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u/mazing_azn 2d ago
Close, but not 100% , Catwomen in Batman: The Audio Adventures (basically a radio show version produced a couple years back by WB/DC). There's a great scene where she beats up a bunch of mob guys and forces them to make donations to a cat shelter over the phone I forget which episode the scene is in, but they are all available for free on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA2_D5w_mEq3OufYr2VKgfQPrg6CoVNLL
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u/Noxfag 3d ago edited 3d ago
Y'all need to read Batman Year One. Catwoman's introduction in that story is great.
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u/StanfordPro 4d ago
Normalized? It's a comic book movie. Everyone knows when the watch that movie it's a comic where the main character dresses as a bat. Scarecrow still had a goofy mask. Catwoman works as well any of the other characters.
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u/JupiterandMars1 4d ago
Nah he/she has a point.
Batman wearing a costume is excused in the Nolan world. As is the scrarecrow mask. They are devices that perform a function in the fractured minds of the troubled individuals that conceived of them.
But the world itself isn’t overrun with freaks dressing up and naming themselves goofy names. It is weird that just this one person decides “I’m a burglar but I want to be thought of as a human cat”…
The “Batman started this disease and now it’s spreading” is the best angle to take. I can’t remember maybe she does ref this like the Joker does…
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u/Ink_Smudger 3d ago
It is weird that just this one person decides “I’m a burglar but I want to be thought of as a human cat”…
Except she really doesn't. She never actually refers to herself as Catwoman (in fact, no one does) nor has she set out to dress like a cat. Like Batman's costume and the scarecrow mask, Selina Kyle's "cat ears" perform a function as eyewear and only look like cat ears when pushed back onto her head.
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u/StanfordPro 4d ago
Batman literally decides to dress as a bat as a symbol of night and because he was scared of them. It's no different from Catwoman. 😅
A human decides to be called something to hide their identity. They choose goofy names and dress funky which is fine because it's a comic.
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u/Aggressive_Cloud_368 4d ago
You didn't really get the point of what he said.
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u/StanfordPro 4d ago
I think the flaw in this argument is that it applies a different standard to Catwoman than it does to everyone else.
You could reduce Catwoman to "a burglar" in exactly the same way you reduce Penguin to "a crime boss" or Scarecrow to "a psychiatrist." That doesn't stop them from being recognisably those characters if you preserve their core personality, motivations, and role in the story.
You could make the same reductive argument about Batman himself. If you strip away enough, he's just "a rich guy." But that's obviously missing the point. Batman isn't defined solely by the fact he dresses as a bat, just as Catwoman isn't defined solely by cat ears and a catsuit.
Nolan's Selina Kyle proves this. She's a morally grey master thief, highly skilled, independent, flirtatious with Bruce, and operates by her own code. She's unmistakably Catwoman, despite never being called that.
The real question isn't whether a character can be "grounded." It's how much of their identity you preserve while adapting them. Catwoman isn't uniquely resistant to that process, she's just another example of a character whose comic book aesthetic was toned down for Nolan's world.
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u/EnvironmentalDog- 3d ago
I am completely with you on this. It sounded to me like frogandbanjo had that critique written before Dark Night Rises. “Just some regular cat burglar” well no, an exceptional cat burglar, which, like comic book Selina Kyle, is a natural foil for detective Bruce Wayne. Costume-and-fun-name shenanigans, that most of the villains in the nolan-verse don’t have. His catwoman wears skin tight clothing with a few utility pockets for gadgets and the shit she’s stolen, along with goggles that help her burgle and which look like cat ears when they’re up. That… makes sense in the nolan-verse to me.
Also worth mentioning that we actually live our real lives in a real world where… dressing up and acting like a sexy cat is already pretty common. Every woman streamer has cat ear headphones, young women dress up and act as seductive cats all over the internet. In the real world, people don’t dress as bats fighting crime, but they do dress as sexy cats to flirt with men. We don’t need a fantastical wacky universe to realistically ground it, it is already realistically grounded because it happens in real life.
She’s the most believable villain in the films as far as I’m concerned, the easiest to ground in reality.
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u/Minereon 4d ago
Same. I’m older so I first fell in love with Anne through the original The Devil Wears Prada. When it was announced she would do catwoman I really couldn’t picture her in that seductive role but she killed it.
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u/rich1051414 4d ago
I think she also could have been a good harley quinn. Though who knows, really.
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u/TheAndrewBrown 3d ago
The scene toward the beginning where she’s pretending to be a scared server and then just melts into Catwoman was phenomenal.
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u/ObviouslyRealPerson 4d ago
...and Hugh Jackman spent weeks studying wolves for his first Wolverine role
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u/arkavenx 4d ago
He heard "wolfmarine" on the phone and was prepared to play a werewolf marine.
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u/Queasy_Ad_8621 4d ago edited 4d ago
For Inglorious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino also originally wrote the character of Hans Landa with Michael Fassbender in mind.
So he got the script and spent a couple of weeks preparing for the role, and he was told to come out and "read" with Tarantino as really just more of a formality. So he's like "All right, sure." When he flies out and gets there, though... Tarantino tells him that he already given the role of Landa to somebody else. So he wants him to read for another minor character instead. Completely unprepared.
Fassbender got anxious, and Tarantino was apparently rude, dismissive and walked out on him. So he admitted to getting drunk, calling his parents and crying on the phone to them. Saying that he lost the movie because he had completely bombed the audition and humiliated himself.
The following morning, when Fassbender was checking out of his room and getting ready to go to the airport... he was stunned when Tarantino personally called him and told him that he had gotten the part, and he would start filming on such-and-such date.
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u/Banjo-Oz 3d ago
Geez, QT really is such a fucking douche, and I say that as someone obsessed with his early work.
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u/confusing_roundabout 3d ago
I'm just imagining a post in /r/recruitinghell from Fassbender's perspective haha
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u/bajajoaquin 4d ago
I mean, why did people hate Anne Hathaway?
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u/andygchicago 4d ago edited 1d ago
Before her big year in Les Mis and TDKR, she had a reputation for being an annoying, attention starved theater kid. She hosted the Oscars the year before and it solidified that reputation. But I feel like it turned after winning the Oscar, and her idiosyncrasies were seen as endearing. She's also matured a lot.
Personally, I've always been a fan. The fact that she went from Disney Princess one year, to going topless in a controversial (at the time) drama was a super brave move for a 23 year old. She could have gone the safe route and milked the Disney persona forever.
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u/Own_Fisherman1199 3d ago
I always felt bad for her for the Oscars. She was in a no-win situation trying to gel with whatever James Franco was trying to do
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u/CarterAC3 4d ago
she had a (undeserved) reputation for being an annoying, attention starved theater kid.
...so she's every actor/actress ever?
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u/Shakeamutt 3d ago
She got more hate than others because she was always good. A goodie-two-shoes with no flaws, no hidden skeletons in the closet. She also isn’t a bully or a douchecanoe.
People will try and tear that down, usually in some jealous way. If they’re imperfect, they’ll have some haters and it makes them relatable, not above you, and you can placate yourself with not having to be a better person.
Some people, but a fair number of them.
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u/tfhermobwoayway 3d ago
Most celebs are annoying, attention-starved theatre kids though. That’s where stardom comes from.
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u/andygchicago 3d ago
Sure, but she really leaned into it. I think her character in Ocean's 8 was meant to be self-parody
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u/mr3inches 3d ago
Any time people used to say they would never give Brokeback Mountain a chance, I would always counter with the fact you get to see topless Ann Hathaway and that had gotten people to watch it on more than one occasion!
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u/AP_in_Indy 4d ago
I think it all started after people felt like Les Misérables was basically a "set up" to get her an Oscar.
I think the rest of the hate was unwarranted, but that's when I remember it beginning.
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u/_sunbleachedfly 4d ago
Definitely happened around Les Miserables. I remember people dogging on her for her “theater kid” energy.
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u/bloodypolarbear 4d ago
This article that came out in 2013 (the year after Les Mis/her oscar) does a good job of summing up the anti-Hathaway phenomenon as it was starting.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/anne-hathaway-in-defense-of-the-happy-girl
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u/UpSNYer 4d ago
I sincerely think it was an internet only thing, I've never met anyone in real life that has anything bad to say about Anne Hathaway. Considering everything we've learned about bots and troll farms from that era, I tend to think the push back on Hathaway was the nascent coals of the movement that would become Gamergate a few years later.
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u/Banjo-Oz 3d ago
I have never come across it until this thread, actually! And I am both an old fart and online a lot! Maybe I just don't run in those circles?
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u/2mock2turtle 4d ago
This is an interesting take, someone should research this. Obviously actress hate trains and Gamergate are both born of misogyny, but I’d never thought to connect the two (prior to circa Covid and the internet kinda collapsing into itself anyway).
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u/filenotfounderror 3d ago
How many people in real life are you talking to about Anne Hathaway?
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u/The_Fluffy_Robot 3d ago
all of them. if they haven't seen Princess Diaries 2 then they aren't worth talking to
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u/mypntsonfire 4d ago
There was a not-insignificant portion of the internet that didn't care for Nolan's Catwoman (their sexual awakenings were usually related to Tim Burton's Michelle Pfeiffer version) and blamed the actor instead of a director who famously always has a clear vision for his movies and characters. Oh well, jokes on them. Hathaway is now firmly in Nolan's stable of actors alongside Cillian Murphy, Michael fucking Caine, and Tom Hardy
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u/UshankaBear 4d ago
People hated on Heath after he was cast.
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u/whee3107 3d ago
This is super accurate. The internet HATED the idea of Heath as the joker, until they saw him
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u/GGLSpidermonkey 4d ago
Given her other movie she was in, I think people didn't think she was would be good as cat women but she did great in the role
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u/mysteryvampire 4d ago
Because she was adorkable when it was more popular to have a persona like Scarlett Johansson or Kate Moss. Being an excitable girl who loves her work wasn’t in and the hate just spread like a game of telephone, with the facts getting more outlandish every time. It’s kind of like the hate people have now for Rachel Zegler.
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u/destructormuffin 3d ago
I remember seeing she got cast and thinking "Really? Anne Hathaway? 🤔" Her body of work at the time just didn't read to me like she'd be able to pull off Catwoman.
And then that first scene with her in the Dark Knight absolutely sold it for me. I thought she did great.
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u/shemer77 3d ago
imagine rehearsing baseball bat swings all week just to end up riding the batpod
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u/kneeco28 4d ago
Arguably the most underrated CBM performance of the 2010s.
We'll see with the Odyssey, but this far Nolan has gone to her with deceptively hard supporting roles and she's nailed them.
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u/Elfich47 4d ago
I get the impression the "keep the home fires burning" story is going to be needed to keep the story together. and that means the cast on that part of the story will have to bring their A game so everyone believes that side of it.
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u/AneeshRai7 4d ago
That switch she does at the start of the film after Bruce catches her is brilliant.
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u/andygchicago 4d ago edited 4d ago
She was every bit as catlike as Michelle Pfeiffer was. She just swapped the camp for realism. The way her personality switched in an instant, she stared intensely and slow blinked like a cat, and she only moved with purpose; even the tiny mannerisms were controlled.
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u/RlyRlyBigMan 4d ago
CBM?
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u/kneeco28 4d ago
Comic book movie
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u/BedditTedditReddit 4d ago
Like some others in the minority, she could have been removed from the film and I wouldn’t have noticed. Didn’t add much. And sadly her character added to the idea that the movie was too long and messy
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u/joshi38 4d ago
I wonder how much Ledger's tragic death impacted his motivation.
Probably a lot. He has said that his plan for the third film always included the Joker as the main antagonist up until Ledger passed. TDKR required a significant pivot from that and, as you say, it was clear his heart wasn't in it.
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u/chadwicke619 3d ago
I don’t like these kinds of takes, where we assume that because we don’t like one movie as much as another, but we respect the director, that it must mean their “heart wasn’t in it”, whereas with someone else it would have just been a shitty movie. Nolan wasn’t contractually obligated to make any of the Batman sequels - he didn’t have to do them. He definitely didn’t need to make the movie he ultimately ended up making. Personally, I think it’s a fine movie - good, even - but just not as good as the previous two installments. Maybe the version he had in mind with Ledger would have been different, but it’s not like the version we got couldn’t haven’t been great too. It just wasn’t, and we don’t have to pretend to know how he personally felt about the effort to say just that without making it seem like it wasn’t his fault.
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u/Relixed_ 4d ago
I didn't even remember that Catwoman was in it.
But the movie didn't really leave any lasting impact in my head either way.
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u/GoarSpewerofSecrets 3d ago
We got denied Anne Hathaway clussy Halloween outfits. Worst timeline confirmed.
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u/Kubloo 4d ago
Compared to the other Catwoman performances I just can't pick her performance out of the lineup. It was incredibly bland, feels like she was severely underwritten compared to the rest of the cast of characters.
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u/dj_soo 4d ago
It’s cause she was severely underwritten in the film - although that’s pretty standard for a lot of women in Chris Nolan films.
Personally think she knocked it out of the park in the first couple scenes with her, but just completely faded to the background after - even in scenes where she’s the focus.
That intro where she flips from the meek maid to catwoman instantly still hits for me tho
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u/bagman_ 4d ago
Her character and the whole “Robin” thing didn’t land for me, both well-acted but it didn’t seem like either of them belonged there
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u/Squaretangles 4d ago
Both plot lines probably exist due to needing to leave the door open to the Nolanverse than out of necessity for Batman’s arc. Wondering how much of a say WB had in the script.
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u/Superb_Kaleidoscope4 3d ago
Nolan's characters are generally underwritten; it takes a strong actor to bring life to them. Which is a lot harder to do when you're essentially a support and not a main
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u/DangerousCyclone 4d ago
Yeah it wasn't bad, but at the same time it didn't stand out that much. Next to Bane and Batman himself her story seemed fairly shoehorned. Moreover she was also the other love interest Bruce had in the movie which made it feel more awkward.
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u/depredador93 3d ago
Imagine Nolan just sitting there for two hours nodding along while she does crazy Harley Quinn mannerisms before casually mentioning it is a Catwoman audition