After more than a decade, screenwriter John Rogers has finally confirmed what many have long suspected: the 2004 film Catwoman is not a very good movie. The occasion for Rogers’ statement was a tweet from the Federalist’s D.C. McAllister, suggesting that people getting excited over Black Panther were somehow insincere, given that Catwoman wasn’t greeted with similar praise:

Michelle Obama says it's about time black kids have a superhero that reflects who they are. Why didn't we hear this when Halle Berry as Catwoman was released years ago? #BlackPanther pic.twitter.com/roLhfLAZgz — Denise McAllister (@McAllisterDen) February 22, 2018

The first problem with McAllister’s tweet is that we did, in fact, “hear this” when Halle Berry made Catwoman, right up to the moment audiences actually got to see Catwoman. The interesting thing looking back at pre-release coverage of the film is that questions of representation are relentlessly discussed, but almost always solely in terms of their potential impact on box office, even by the actors themselves. Here’s Berry’s co-star/love interest Benjamin Bratt on starring in a superhero film with people of color in the leading roles:

That a big movie like Catwoman has two ethnic leads proves that, at a certain point, even people of color become green. That’s what it’s all about. That nobody said a thing about it was a relief to someone like myself who’s been up against walls of discrimination.

And here’s Berry:

This movie presented to me a whole new challenge, something I haven’t done. It allowed me an opportunity to hopefully prove—if I’m really lucky, if the movie god is watching—that a woman, especially a woman of color, can open one of these summer movies.

Whether Bratt and Berry described their work on Catwoman in financial terms because that was the savvy way for actors to talk about movies in 2004 or because they correctly guessed that no one was going to be praising their performances, it wasn’t a secret that the film’s casting was a milestone. In any event, John Rogers wasn’t having it: McAllister’s tweet led him to break Hollywood’s longstanding Code of Not Admitting Catwoman Was Terrible:

As one of the credited writers of CATWOMAN, I believe I have the authority to say: because it was a shit movie dumped by the studio at the end of a style cycle, and had zero cultural relevance either in front of or behind the camera.



This is a bad take. Feel shame. https://t.co/6sth7w38Xx — John Rogers (@jonrog1) February 24, 2018

The film’s other credited writers don’t seem to have weighed in yet. Meanwhile, Rogers has been blown away by media coverage of his tweet, so much so that he wrote a tweetstorm about it:

1/ What the hell is going on with this CATWOMAN tweet? There are *articles* on the @EW and a half dozen other sites about me “admitting” the movie was bad. Like it was a secret. Like I hadn’t confessed I was on the grassy knoll before now. — John Rogers (@jonrog1) February 25, 2018

2/ Did ... did people not know it was not well-received? Did they think we were all sitting around silently fuming that nobody understood our genius?



Is the act of somebody in Hollywood saying “Well,that was unpleasant,” so rare?



40k retweets, 100k Likes. This is madness. — John Rogers (@jonrog1) February 25, 2018

3/ FWIW it did not end my career, I was joking. I made a lot more stuff, like over a 100 hours of stuff. It was actually an excellent lesson, which I shall impart to the young ‘uns.



Due to movie production overlap, I worked on CATWOMAN and TRANSFORMERS a year apart... — John Rogers (@jonrog1) February 25, 2018

4/ My name was on an infamous failure, and then a movie that made hundreds of millions of $ and launched a franchise.



And my life did not change a BIT. I was still writing for a living. Still doing good work I cared about.



It was a valuable lesson. — John Rogers (@jonrog1) February 25, 2018

5/ The box office, the promo, the news sites, all that bullshit - it’s just the entertainment industrial complex.



Win or lose: you get up, you type, you make pages, and you try to be decent to people you work with. And 23 years later, you have a career. — John Rogers (@jonrog1) February 25, 2018

6/ Sadly, that’s the lesson I wish got 40k RT’s but won’t: do the work. Do your best. Get back up. Move on when it sucks.



Life is short, make something. Make a LOT of somethings. Some of them might actually be what somebody, somewhere, didn’t even know they needed. — John Rogers (@jonrog1) February 25, 2018

The notion that you can redeem yourself for Catwoman by launching the Transformers franchise seems a little dodgy as a moral or artistic proposition, but as a matter of accounting, it’s solid. As to whether or not Rogers’ original tweet rates the media coverage its received, as one of the credited writers on “It’s Official: Catwoman Screenwriter Admits Catwoman Is Not a Very Good Movie,” I will be making an official statement on the matter of its quality and newsworthiness fourteen years from now.