Cats

1="If Dante had seen Cats, he would have included a 10th circle of Hell."

- Chris Stuckmann
 * -|2="This is the worst thing to happen to cats since dogs."

- Ricky Gervais
 * -|3="The problem with the film was that Tom Hooper decided that he didn’t want anybody involved in it who was involved in the original show, the whole thing was ridiculous."

- Andrew Lloyd Webber Cats (also referred to by many as Cats 2019) is a 2019 musical fantasy film based on the 1981 stage musical of the same name by Andrew Lloyd Webber, which in turn was based on the poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) by T. S. Eliot. The film was directed by Tom Hooper, in his second feature musical following Les Misérables (2012), from a screenplay by Lee Hall and Hooper. It features an ensemble cast, including James Corden, Judi Dench, Jason Derulo, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellen, Taylor Swift, Rebel Wilson, and Francesca Hayward.

Filming for Cats took place from December 2018 to April 2019. It was theatrically released in the United Kingdom and the United States on December 20, 2019, by Universal Pictures, to a negative response from critics and audiences, who criticized the visual effects and editing. Considered one of the worst films of all time, Cats grossed $75 million on a budget of $80–100 million, making it a box-office bomb. It is estimated to have lost Universal Pictures between $71 million and $114 million after marketing and distribution costs.

Plot
After being abandoned in the streets of London, a young cat named Victoria is introduced to the tribe of other cats called the Jellicles. The Jellicles have a yearly ceremony called the Jellicle Ball, where the cats can compete in to go to the Heaviside Layer and be granted the one-time ability of reincarnation. One of the competing cats, Macavity, plans on kidnapping other competitors to increase his chances of winning.

Development
An animated film adaptation based on the musical was initially planned by Amblimation in the 1990s but was abandoned with the studio's closure. In December 2013, Andrew Lloyd Webber, creator and composer of the musical stage production Cats, teased that Universal Pictures, which had purchased the film rights to Cats many years earlier, was putting the project into active development.

In February 2016, it was reported that Tom Hooper was in negotiations to direct the film, and was considering actresses, including Suki Waterhouse, to star. In May 2016, Hooper was confirmed as director.

In January 2018, Hooper and Working Title began officially casting for the film, while looking into the technical aspect of whether the film would be entirely live-action or computer-generated, with Lloyd Webber announcing he would be writing a new song for the film adaptation. On October 24, 2019, it was announced that the new song was titled "Beautiful Ghosts", written by Lloyd Webber and Taylor Swift. The song was sung by Francesca Hayward, followed later in a reprise by Judi Dench, with a credits version sung by Swift. The version sung by Swift was released on November 15, 2019.

Casting
In June 2018, there were reports Anne Hathaway was considered for a role in the film, but she passed due to a scheduling conflict. Hugh Jackman was also offered a role by Hooper but turned it down. In July 2018, Jennifer Hudson, Taylor Swift, James Corden, and Ian McKellen joined the cast. Swift had previously tested for the role of Éponine in Tom Hooper's Les Misérables but was given the part of Bombalurina without an audition.

In September 2018, Laurie Davidson and Mette Towley were cast, with Steven Spielberg announced to be executive producing. In October 2018, Idris Elba and Judi Dench joined the cast of the film. Dench was cast in the original stage musical, but had been forced to pull out due to a torn Achilles tendon; Lloyd Webber and Hooper decided to make Old Deuteronomy a female cat and offered her the role.

In November 2018, ballet dancers Francesca Hayward and Steven McRae as well as Rebel Wilson, Jason Derulo, and Robert Fairchild joined the cast of the film with rehearsals commencing at Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire, England. Andy Blankenbuehler choreographed the film after Wayne McGregor was forced to back out due to scheduling conflicts. Blankenbuehler also choreographed the stage musical's 2016 Broadway revival. In December 2018, Les Twins and Eric Underwood joined the cast.

Filming
Principal photography began on December 12, 2018, and wrapped on April 2, 2019. Swift said that the cast attended "cat school", in which "We would literally do hours on end of barefoot crawling on the floor, hissing at each other. We learned about cat instincts and the way they carry themselves and the way that they process information, the way they see the world, the way they move."

Visual effects
Cats uses extensive visual effects throughout to convert the live-action actors into computer-animated cats. However, during the production process, the film was originally going to include makeup effects and costume design with fur for the characters. Hooper had experimented with using prosthetics to create the look of the cats due to the then-prohibitive costs of visual effects, but the director was dissatisfied, feeling that "[Y]ou ended up with full-faced prosthetics where you lost so much emotion. [...] So all the paths seemed to lead me back to visual effects." Other reasons of changing visual direction was due to difficulties for most actors and dancers when testing the catsuits, giving much heat and sweat during rehearsals. When production moved to digital options, companies like Technicolor SA subsidiaries Mill Film and MPC joined in for the visual effects. To aid this, the actors performed in motion capture suits with tracking dots on their costumes and faces. The bodies of the cat characters were rendered with digital fur which was blended with the actors' actual faces.

Substantial work on the VFX for Cats was performed at MPC Vancouver, which had previously worked on re-doing the visual effects for mh:greatestmovies:Sonic the Hedgehog. A report by The Daily Beast revealed a troubled production, where sources within one of the VFX studios reported the staff was working 80–90 hour weeks to try and finish the effects by the release date while Hooper would send them denigrating emails about their work and insult them during conferences. This was additionally complicated by Hooper's lack of familiarity with the visual effects process and animation as a whole, where the director would demand entire complete renders be made at great cost or that real-life references of cats be used for every movement. The team spent six months producing the film's two-minute trailer, leaving just four months to finish the entire 110-minute film. The film's visuals were completed just hours before its premiere.

At the 92nd Academy Awards, Corden and Wilson appeared in character as Bustopher Jones and Jennyanydots, mocking the film's CGI while presenting Best Visual Effects. This led to criticism from the production's VFX animators, many of whom were laid off when MPC Vancouver closed following the film's production, as well as condemnation by the Visual Effects Society, an organization representing the VFX industry.

Why It's a Catastrophe (No pun intended)

 * 1) To get the cat out of the bag (no pun intended), the designs of the cats are very creepy, uncanny, and don't even resemble real-life cats; they look more like humans in fursuits especially since they have hands and feet instead of paws. They are also reminiscent of the infamous 2003 film adaptation of The Cat in the Hat, which Universal also distributed.
 * 2) * To make matters worse, when a character turns or tilts their head, their faces barely move, making them look off-center.
 * 3) * Not helping is that there was already major backlash for Sonic the Hedgehog's nightmare fuel character design in his eponymous live-action 2020 movie months prior, so as a result, this received worse backlash, to a point where they claim that his "Uh, meow?" line was a warning for what was yet to come. Unlike the former, however, these designs have not been fixed to look much less nightmarish, but rather fixed because of technical issues (which we will get to later), resulting in the movie not being delayed (delaying it beyond March of 2020 to fix these issues would've caused it to get delayed further due to the COVID-19 pandemic), and therefore becoming a critical and box office failure.
 * 4) Absolutely horrendous CGI:
 * 5) * The computer-generated rotoscoping work used to portray the characters is hideous and can be considered nightmare fuel for some people.
 * 6) * It overuses computer-generated imagery, which causes almost everything in the film to feel fake. Even simple objects could have been props instead of computer-generated imagery.
 * 7) * As the film was apparently only finished 48 hours before the premiere, there were many glitches with the computer-generated imagery in the original theatrical release, particularly in one scene when Dench's hand, complete with her wedding ring, appears instead of her character's cat paw. After poor reviews, Universal had to send another copy to theaters with improved visual effects.
 * 8) * What doesn't help matters is that Hooper had no prior experience working in movies heavily reliant on CGI and special effects, despite some being used in his previous works. For example, he didn't use motion capture suits for the actors, instead rotoscoping the "digital fur technology" on them manually, causing the aforementioned glitches.
 * 9) Poor grasp of the source material. The setting of the film, for example, isn't set in a junkyard like in the original Broadway musical. It also lacks the dark tone of the original.
 * 10) The singing is really bad (save for Jennifer Hudson). For example, in the first song "Jellicles Songs Part 1", all of the singers sound uninterested, non-energetic, or just out of breath.
 * 11) Although they are not as bad as the character designs, the design in most of the areas are also ugly as they either lack color or have too much color, and seem like they have been abandoned for a very long time.
 * 12) The original musical barely had any plot, forcing the writers to basically make one up for the movie. When it appears, it is usually presented through the songs throughout the movie which can be difficult to follow.
 * 13) * Even if one were to understand what the plot is, they will find it to be an uninteresting one.
 * 14) There are even many plot holes, such as; how did Victoria got abandoned on the streets in the opening, despite the rest of the film taking place in Purgatory and not in the real world?
 * 15) Most of the characters are introduced through songs, but some don't appear at all after their song, making them mostly pointless.
 * 16) The plot of the film is very repetitive as a massive chunk of it just consists of introducing a character and having them sing a song.  After the song is done the film haphazardly jumps to the next set piece to do the same thing over again with another cat with this formula going on and on for a long time
 * 17) The acting is so bad (especially considering those involved in the cast) that it can appear unintentionally hilarious to some. The horrible character designs don't help matters at all as they will cause people to take the acting even less seriously.
 * 18) * Questionable casting choices, most notably casting actors who have little to no involvement in the music industry such as Corden and Elba, and musicians who have little to no involvement in the acting industry such as Taylor Swift and Jason Derulo.
 * 19) * Despite being cast as the lead character, Francesca Hayward had no experience in the acting or music industries, with her prior work being only as a ballerina. Not surprisingly, her performance is by far the worst in the movie (with the arguable exception of only Rebel Wilson, and even then Wilson later admitted she knew the movie was going to suck, and so likely wasn't really putting in a full effort).
 * 20) * The acting itself can also sometimes be inconsistent. When Rum Tum Tugger is first introduced, he speaks in a British accent, but once he screams "Let’s dance!", he's suddenly American, before proceeding to sing his musical number, going back and forth between accents.
 * 21) Jennyanydots (Wilson) and Bustopher Jones (Corden) are annoying characters who try to be comedic, but nearly all of their "comedy" is cringe-worthy and unfunny, such as using cat puns that are even worse than Catwoman. They also fat-shame themselves.
 * 22) Many of the characters act horny, like real cats when in heat, which is very inappropriate for a PG-rated movie (or G-rated in Australia).
 * 23) Macavity, the main antagonist, is portrayed as very generic and a major downgrade from the original musical, as he is just one of those villains who does bad stuff just for the sake of it.
 * 24) The sizes of the characters are inconsistent, as they sometimes appear to be as large as a human, or as small as a mouse.
 * 25) Some scenes are very disturbing, especially that one anthropomorphic cockroach scene where one of the cat characters eats a cockroach from under a table.
 * 26) Weak direction by Tom Hooper, who directed way better films such as The King's Speech, Les Miserables and The Danish Girl.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) A few of the actors do a good job portraying their characters, despite the bad script (or lack of one altogether).
 * 2) * Taylor Swift's brief appearance as Bombalurina is by far one of the best parts of the movie.
 * 3) The music is fairly decent to listen to, despite most of it being unoriginal. Jennifer Hudson's cover of "Memory" is a particular standout.
 * 4) Some could get some ironic enjoyment out of how utterly insane and bonkers the movie is.

Critical and audience response
Upon release, Cats was critically panned by critics and moviegoers, who criticized the CGI effects, plot, and tone, with many calling it one of the worst films of 2019 or even of all time. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a critic approval rating of 19%, with an average rating of 3.68/10, and reads "Despite its fur-midable cast, this Cats adaptation is a clawful mistake that will leave most viewers begging to be put out of their mew-sery.". On Metacritic, the film has a critic score of 32/100. On IMDb, the film has an average user rating of 2.8/10. On Letterboxd, the film has an average rating of 1.4/5. Cinemascore gave the film a C+, while PostTrak gave it 1/2 star out of 5.

Angry Joe gave the film a 1/10, the same score that Holmes and Watson received the previous year, calling the film "a total waste of money". His two friends Other Joe and Alex both gave the film a 2/10. Chris Stuckmann gave the film an "F" and described the movie as a "drug trip" and stated that there was "nothing redeeming" about the film. Jeremy Jahns gave this movie a Catshit! rating.

The movie currently has a Google users rating of "28% of users liked this film".

Peter Debruge of Variety called the film "one of those once-in-a-blue-moon embarrassments that mars the résumés of great actors (poor Idris Elba, already scarred enough as the villainous Macavity) and trips up the careers of promising newcomers (like ballerina Francesca Hayward, whose wide-eyed, mouth-agape Victoria displays one expression for the entire movie)." He criticized the direction and effects, and predicted that the film would appeal to furries, though many furries also found the effects disturbing. David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter felt that the film was "hobbled by a major misjudgment in its central visual concept", lamenting its execution (such as the poor proportions of the "cats" to their environments) and deeming the film "exhausting". Peter Travers of Rolling Stone rated the film 0 out of 5 stars, stating it was "bizarre", had terrible special effects, and made the audience "want to cry for mercy", while Hooper "traps the actors in an airless, lifeless bubble of a film that scarcely gives them room to breathe, much less develop a character".

In the Los Angeles Times, Justin Chang wrote that "With its grotesque design choices and busy, metronomic editing, Cats is as uneasy on the eyes as a Hollywood spectacle can be, tumbling into an uncanny valley between mangy realism and dystopian artifice." Debruge said that the film should have used "face paint and Lycra" like the musical. Simran Hans of The Observer agreed that "many of its uncanny images are sure to haunt viewers for generations". Her one-star review described the film as "a clear career low" for most of the actors, wondering whether they "are aware of what they've gotten themselves into". Peter Bradshaw for The Guardian agreed with the one-star rating. In a review parodying "The Naming of Cats", he criticized the visual style and particularly the character design, while lambasting the film as a "dreadful hairball of woe". Manohla Dargis of The New York Times felt that Hooper had made "a robust effort" to adapt the stage musical—which "was always going to be difficult, particularly once the decision was made to create a live-action version rather than an animated one"—and "enlisted some talented performers", but that the film version suffered from a lack of the human connection that theatre involves, where performers and audience share a space, without which "all that's left are canned images of fit-looking people meowing and raising their rumps high in the air".

The Hollywood Reporter named Cats one of the ten worst films of 2019, Travers said it "easily scores as the bottom of the 2019 barrel—and arguably of the decade", and Adam Graham of The Detroit News said "Cats is the biggest disaster of the decade, and possibly thus far in the millennium. It's Battlefield Earth with whiskers." Alex Cranz of io9 warned, "I have seen sights no human should see" but said others "must witness" Hooper's, the actors, and Hollywood's hubris, citing a human being appearing in a group of cats, a cat-coloured woman without fur, and other examples of how "the shit's just not finished." Ty Burr of The Boston Globe's half-star review said "there are moments in 'Cats' I would gladly pay to unsee" and warned small children to not watch the film. He reported that the preview audience laughed like the reaction to Springtime for Hitler during Dench's "The Ad-dressing of Cats" because each pause in her lyrics seemed to be the end of the film ("at long last") before continuing. Patrick Gibbs of SLUG Magazine said that "There is not enough kitty litter in the world to cover up this mess."

Pete Hammond of Deadline complimented Taylor Swift's performance as Bombalurina and her signature "Macavity" number, as well as "Beautiful Ghosts", which she wrote along with Lloyd Webber. Critic Guy Lodge called Swift "the best thing in the film" and "the one performer who completely hits their marks and pulls off the lone successful number," while critic Rebecca Lewis described Swift's performance as "one of the few genuinely good parts of the film". Patrick Ryan of USA Today stated that Swift "makes the most of her brief screen time, bringing her unabating charisma to the flirtatious feline ... if there's one thing that's disappointing about Swift's performance, it's that there isn't more of it". Hans said that she was the only actor "who seems to be having fun, perhaps because she only appears in the film for approximately 10 minutes." Jennifer Hudson similarly received praise for her rendition of "Memory", with some critics describing it as "the best part" of the film and "the sole musical number in the new movie that summons real feeling".

The musical's creator, Andrew Lloyd Webber, also disowned the movie, calling it "ridiculous" in an interview with The Sunday Times, saying, "The problem with the film was that Tom Hooper decided that he didn’t want anybody involved in it who was involved in the original show." He later revealed in an interview with The Daily Telegraph that "I wrote to the head of Universal and said, 'You've got a car crash on your hands unless you get a grip on this thing', a year before they made (it). I didn't even get a reply." In a 2021 interview with Variety, Lloyd Webber claimed his negative reaction to the film had even directly inspired him to adopt a Havanese dog.

Rich Juzwiak of Jezebel predicted in early January 2020 that Cats might become a cult classic like mh:greatestmovies:The Rocky Horror Picture Show, noting that costumed screenings in Brooklyn and sing-along screenings in Toronto and Los Angeles were selling out. As of February 2020, Milwaukee's Oriental Theatre, Coolidge Corner Theatre near Boston, and FilmScene in Iowa City are among notable small theaters showing Cats. Coolidge Corner gives Rocky Horror-like viewing instructions to audiences at its monthly showings.

Despite the negative reviews, the user scores on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic were mixed with an audience approval rating of 55% and an average rating of 3.25/5 on the former, and a user score of 5.5/10 on the latter.

Universal themselves disowned the movie as well, finding it so bad that they made the movie ineligible to receive a nomination or award at the 92nd Academy Awards with the ceremony itself even poking fun at the film when two of the film's cast members showed up dressed as their respective characters, complete with actual make-up and cat-suits in contrast to the CGI characters.

Box office
Cats grossed $27.2 million in the United States and Canada, and $47.4 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $74.6 million against a production budget of about $95 million. Deadline Hollywood calculated the net loss of the film to be $113.6 million.

In the United States and Canada, Cats was initially projected to gross $15–20 million in its opening weekend. Universal hoped that the film would appeal to young women as counterprogramming against Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and emphasized Swift in marketing; however, she did not heavily promote the film to her fans, as she only appeared for one song. After making $2.6 million on its opening day (including $550,000 from Thursday night previews), estimates for Cats were lowered to $7 million. Ultimately, the film only debuted to $6.5 million, finishing fourth at the box office. The poor performance was attributed to the negative reception of the trailers, poor reviews, and competition from The Rise of Skywalker.

In its second weekend, Cats made $4.8 million (for a total of $8.7 million over the five-day Christmas period), finishing in eighth place. It then made $2.6 million in its third weekend, finishing tenth.

Accolades
On December 26, 2019, it was reported that Universal had removed Cats from its For Your Consideration web page. The film was not available on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' private streaming media platform for award contenders.

At the 40th annual Golden Raspberry Awards in 2020 (which became a YouTube video dubbed "The Lock-Down Edition"), Cats won six trophies, including "Worst Screenplay" for writers Lee Hall and Tom Hooper, "Worst Director" for Hooper, "Worst Screen Combo" for "Any Two Half-Feline/Half-Human Hairballs", "Worst Supporting Actress" for Rebel Wilson, "Worst Supporting Actor" for James Corden, and "Worst Picture".

In the 2020 YoGa awards, presented by Barcelona-based critics association Catacric, Cats shared a special award for worst CGI makeup with mh:greatestmovies: The Irishman and Gemini Man.

Videos
gq50F-IDXDc yleb8iqI2cY SRuQzlVjOSM a6s4UNR_53s R_8xGwgA97w 2m0tAKVFWR4 COVmFhgEUio yAqkWvsyqEU NRBjLB1qwYI oACVIU7yPLM 7VrKwDcqHuI LqFcz_ovA6Q M0eFWoU4CEA dpfoOvRhwrs H7CpOdB2-rg J-werwF6PQI <youtube width=256 height=145>QGx5h7KKiow <youtube width=256 height=145>G6iqAip-ZNo <youtube width=256 height=145>YubMIQZMYrc <youtube width=256 height=145>hVzTrCsAPVA <youtube width=256 height=145>6vA-gPqoIQ8 <youtube width=256 height=145>1hL-3MRle7o <youtube width=256 height=145>e5QOHuTfkC8 <youtube width=256 height=145>QFHSrP01Y2A <youtube width=256 height=145>bABUsLP2vwM <youtube width=256 height=145>ZNdIWXIqCcA

Trivia

 * Amblimation (animation company of Amblin Entertainment) was originally going to make a traditional animated musical film based on Cats in 1997. Unfortunately, the project was abandoned because of the failure of mh:greatestmovies: Balto competing against Pixar's mh:greatestmovies: Toy Story and leading to the closure of Amblimation Studios which was later folded into DreamWorks Animation (now owned by Universal since 2016).
 * Thankfully, many concept art and character sketches of Amblimation Cats have surfaced across the internet.
 * There's an internet rumor that an original cut for the movie that featured several CGI anuses exists, dubbed the "Butthole Cut". The producers have somewhat confirmed that it's real, although one of the buttholes is said to be left unedited by accident.
 * Steven Spielberg served as an uncredited executive producer.
 * The designs of the cats in this film became a meme due to how bad they are, like how the original Sonic design from the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog movie became a meme for being creepy.
 * Given how the first cases of COVID-19 came around the release date of this movie, some people on social media are led to believe that this movie is so bad, that it caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
 * There is also a 2018 animated film with the same name that has actual cats.