Ashley Judd is reconsidering one of her earliest box office hits. In a recent Instagram video post, Judd noted how her relationship with 1997’s “Kiss the Girls” has “evolved” over the years due to the film’s depiction of violence against women.
‘”Kiss the Girls’ centers on male sexual violence and the torture of women’s bodies,” Judd wrote in her caption. “At the time, we often framed stories like this around female resilience—the strength of surviving. Many people still say that’s what the film means to them. But I’ve found myself asking a different question: Why is sexual terror against women something we package as entertainment? Why is it profitable?”
“Kiss the Girls” was adapted from James Patterson’s 1995 novel of the same name and was directed by Gary Fleder. Morgan Freeman starred as forensic psychologist Alex Cross, while Judd played a doctor and kickboxer who is abducted by a masked serial killer who calls himself Casanova.
“Thank you for loving the movie, thank you for loving me in it,” Judd told her fans in the corresponding video message. “Thank you for making it such… I was gonna say pivotal, but I would even say a transformative moment in my career.”
“I want to talk about the movie in a way that has become more clear to me over the years, and I invite you to consider [this] for yourself. It’s okay to love the movie and come up to me and say it’s your favorite movie,” Judd continued, doubling down on questioning “why filming male sexual violence” and “torture of the female body” is considered entertaining. She also said the movie contains “very misogynistic dialogue,” which is “excruciatingly not okay.”
“It’s the resilience after male sexual violence. It’s resilience after male sexual torture of the female body and I go… why is that entertainment? Why is that a capitalist enterprise? Why do we create entertainment and earn money off of such a subject?” Judd asked. “So we’re valorizing my [character’s] resilience in the movie but we’re not necessarily critiquing or wrestling with or holding at arms’ length why… the movie is about trauma, and it is traumatizing… To me, this is not entertainment. It’s collective denial… and making entertainment out of sexual terror.”
“Kiss the Girls” was a box office hit for Paramount Pictures in 1997, grossing $60 million worldwide on a budget just under $30 million. Freeman returned as Alex Cross in the 2001 sequel “Along Came a Spider,” which was an even bigger box office hit with $105 million worldwide.
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