The Criterion Channel is celebrating indie film icon Parker Posey this month — and part of that celebration has involved streaming one of the best comic book movies ever made. The Parker Posey Collection, streaming on Criterion starting this week, brings a comic book movie to Criterion. That’s a rarity, since the Criterion Collection is widely regarded as a haven for high art in cinema, which isn’t something that people associate with comic book movies. It makes slightly more sense — at least to its intended audience — when you realize that the comic book movie now streaming on Criterion isn’t Posey’s Superman Returns but rather 2001’s Josie and the Pussycats, in which she played the flim’s villain.
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Josie and the Pussycats was a disappointment at the box office upon its release, and drew mostly negative reviews at the time. It found its audience on home video, and has gone on to become a cult classic with regular screenings at places like Alamo Drafthouse. Directed by Can’t Hardly Wait‘s Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, the movie starred Rachael Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson, and Tara Reid as the band, with Posey and Alan Cumming appearing as the villains.
“I think the problem was that it was marketed really badly,” Cumming told me in a 2021 interview. “I think it was marketed to young kids sort of as a tween movie, when actually it’s quite a sophisticated script, and it’s about the gags that are for meant for sophisticated older consumers. I think they didn’t know quite what to do with it, and it was marketed wrongly. And so basically the [part] of the populace it was aimed at, weren’t made aware of it when it came out.”
You can see Criterion’s teaser for Josie and the Pussycats below.
The movie came out in the same year as Legally Blonde, and both of them used similar tactics, playing on a hyper-feminine color palette and using the tropes of teen movies to make a broader commentary about American life. Josie famously has barely a frame that wasn’t saturated with advertising and product placement — but the filmmakers have since revealed that nobody paid for all of that product placement. It was just there as a commentary on the increasingly commercialized nature of the music industry, the film industry, and public spaces in American cities.
To Josie‘s detriment, a lot of critics assumed a movie about teenage girls wasn’t “smart enough” to know what it was doing in that regard. Numerous reviews at the time ignored the obvious satire in the movie and opined that its anti-consumerist commentary was misguided because…y’know…there were a lot of corporate logos in it.
The movie started to be reappraised about a decade ago, with stories coming from online news and entertainment sites calling the movie underrated and ahead of its time. When Mondo’s vinyl version of the movie’s soundtrack first dropped in 2017, it was accompanied by a special screening with a Q&A by Dawson, Reid, Cook, the filmmakers, and Letters to Cleo singer Kay Hanley, who provided the singing voice for Josie on the soundtrack. The Mondo event in 2017 also featured a live performance of the soundtrack songs by Hanley along with many of the musicians who had worked with her on the soundtrack, including Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, who passed away in 2020 from COVID-19.
In 2021, to celebrate the movie’s 20th anniversary, Universal Pictures actually did a Josie and the Pussycats social media takeover and Mill Creek Entertainment put the movie out on Blu-ray for the first time. A book-length oral history was released to tell the story of the movie’s production and rise to cult classic status, and outlets like Entertainment Tonight revisited the movie for the first time since 2001, interviewing the cast and digging up old archival footage from their original set visit in 2000.
Fans of the movie have lobbied to get it added to the Criterion Collection, a select group of movies released on feature-rich DVD and Blu-rays. Presently (unless we’re missing something), the only comic book movie available from the Criterion Collection is another 2001 comic book adaptation starring young women: Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World.
