Cats gets re-edited to appease critics

Tom Hooper’s cinematic take on the Cats musical has been met with widespread derision. Now it seems that an ‘improved’ version has been sent out to cinemas in the run up to Christmas.

When the first trailer dropped for Cats earlier this year, most people had more than a fair few questions. Why is Jason Derulo in this movie? Why does everything look so oddly sexual? Is that Idris Elba singing as a cat?

The widespread reaction was one of confusion and horror. Hopes for the film weren’t high, but we couldn’t rush to conclusions. After all, it hadn’t actually been released yet. There was still potential. Perhaps all that disturbing human-cat-hybrid CGI would translate better in a long form film?

Unfortunately, reviews have been almost universally negative, with critics describing Cats as a nightmarish, baffling movie that stimulates nothing but terror in even the most weathered of moviegoers. It also had a lacklustre box office opening that’s unlikely to match it’s €100 million budget, only making €6.5 million in the US.

To combat this hot mess of a release, the Hollywood Reporter has claimed that Universal Studios is distributing an ‘updated’ version of the film with ‘improved visual effects’. The change will affect screenings worldwide, supposedly making the anthropomorphic characters slightly less terrifying (if that’s at all possible at this point). Which specific scenes and characters will be affected by the revisions is currently unclear, but expect plenty of analysis by publications in the following weeks.

And no, Jason Derulo is not removed from this revision, as disappointing as that may be.

Redistributing a film is a rare occurrence, and a bold move. It proves to audiences that the original cut was unfinished and diminishes the reputation of the work even further.

Hooper himself admitted this week that he barely had the film finished before its premiere in New York. According to critics, this mismanagement shows in the final cut. The film currently has an 18% score on Rotten Tomatoes and nearly every review has panned it. Publications such as The Guardian have also called into question the odd sexusilation of human-cat CGI creatures, going so far as to compare it to the crude horror film The Human Centipede.

YouTube reviewer Chris Stuckmann sums up the movie’s many flaws hilariously well below.