While the Material Girl’s cinematic vehicle suffered the supposed bad luck reserved for movies with actual question marks in the title, the lack of punctuation served the theme song and concert tour much better. Both were huge hits.
So the superstition lived on? I guess.
No, this was seriously a thing. There’s an old Hollywood superstition that movies and shows with question marks in the title generally flopped, so studios avoided them. It’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, not Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But not everyone cared about this. Just ask Harry Crumb.
What makes Who’s That Girl pop-culturally fascinating is that Madonna somehow managed to fail upward through two consecutive box office disasters. Shanghai Surprise had already crashed and burned in ’86, plagued by paparazzi wars and punchy Sean Penn chaos. George Harrison literally had to hold a press conference begging the media to leave them alone.
So Who’s That Girl was supposed to be a comeback of sorts. Warner Bros kept Penn away, hired James Foley (who’d directed her videos), gave her a safe and reliable star-making screwball comedy. They also synchronized the soundtrack and worldwide tour for maximum cross-promotional impact and visibility.
It still tanked.
Turns out there were no gains in conflating the name of a movie, an album and a tour.
But here’s the thing. After two straight failures trying to make Madonna happen as a conventional movie star, Hollywood stopped trying. She wouldn’t take another high-profile film role for three years until Dick Tracy, where she was part of Warren Beatty’s ensemble and didn’t have to carry much. Just her own soundtrack album, one of three released for the movie. Then A League of Their Own let her hide between Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, and a baseball team’s worth of co-stars. She was actually good in both.
Yet after earning some actual acting cred, she went straight back to trying to carry a film solo as a provocative femme fatale in Body of Evidence in 1993. Even Madonna doing her best Sharon Stone impression, Willem Dafoe and hot candle wax couldn’t save it. The film earned multiple Razzie nominations and essentially ended her attempts at being a leading lady. For a while. Anyway, I digress.
Who indeed was that girl? Looking back, maybe Madonna learned that being Madonna was enough. People might have been more interested if her character was closer to her then-public persona rather than a manic pixie version of herself. Nikki Finn isn’t Madonna, she’s just in Madonna drag.
The tour grossed $25 million. The singles went number one worldwide. The movie that shared their name barely broke even.
Perhaps the real question mark was whether she needed to pursue acting at all. -Pop
Who’s That Girl arrived on home video today in 1988, after a famously lacklustre August 7, 1987 theatrical release.