Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019)

[therewillbeblus]

Somehow this looks even worse now. The idea that a large proportion of audiences will laugh at lines like "Cat got your tongue" or "Don't mess with this crazy cat lady" is perhaps more unsettling than the Adam Sandler Netflix numbers.

domino, the Bogdanovich in me wants to be optimistic too. I really hope this bombs if only so that my faith in humanity can be briefly restored.

[domino harvey]

This is opening the same weekend as Star Wars too... like, this is some kind of tax scam from the studio, right?

[mfunk9786]

We just need to accept that this will be a huge, critic-proof hit and move on.

I've been wrong before, but no way this is a hit

EDIT: Holy shit, I just read the budget for this film is $300 MILLION DOLLARS

Will make the bombing all the more satisfying.

[Altair]

I hope I'm wrong, but this appeals to a very different audience than Star Wars - it's actually potentially quite canny counter-programming. It will bring audiences who probably don't go to the cinema very often. I'm sure Universal think this will appeal to women, older people, musical fans, Taylor Swift fans - a coalition not likely to be too swayed by Star Wars. In that sense, this is really closer to films such as Mamma Mia or Hooper's own Les Miserables.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

There is an argument for this as counterprogramming, but the roughly $700 million it would need to recoup a $300m budget (plus marketing and distribution) has never been attained by a musical outside of Disney movies and Bohemian Rhapsody. That said, I'm leery of the $300m figure, given that the source is a Guardian article from July that offhandedly mentions "an estimated budget of £230m," failing to note that this would make it the most expensive "British" movie of all time (surpassing even the recent Bond films) and would land it among the five most expensive movies from any country. A slip of the keyboard seems like a possible explanation here, although I have no idea what the actual figure would be. But I doubt that Universal is spending more on this than Disney spends on their Star Wars movies.

[movielocke]

They must be desperate if they're now trying to sneak this film past musical haters by not featuring a single song in the trailer. It still looks terrible, like a video game demo from 2011

The whole trailer would play to “everybody wants to be a cat!” From Disney’s Aristocats. That’s the missing song right?

[brundlefly]

They must be desperate if they're now trying to sneak this film past musical haters by not featuring a single song in the trailer. It still looks terrible, like a video game demo from 2011

The whole trailer would play to “everybody wants to be a cat!” From Disney’s Aristocats. That’s the missing song right?

First read this as "aristocrats," which has potential as the final word of dialogue.

[jsteffe]

Here is a more optimistic view of the film's box office prospects. You can accept argument that or not. It the film really does cost £230m it will be a challenge to break even, given that Les Miserables grossed $440 worldwide. That creepy CGI will keep me from seeing it, but one ticket doesn't matter much. And I'm not the film's target audience.

[domino harvey]

First screening last night, though reviews are embargoed til Weds. Trickled out reaction is what you’d expect: awful mixed with stunned disbelief. Early reports indicate the film also has humanoid mice and cockroaches

[DarkImbecile]

Supposedly Tom Hooper said at the premiere that he was still editing as of yesterday morning, which is always a good sign

[Michael Kerpan]

My kids (when young) saw a bit of Cats on TV (not yet having been exposed to any ALW at all -- but plenty of Sondheim and Bernstein and Gershwin) and instantly demanded that the channel be changed (which I had intended to do in any event).

[Brian C]

Trickled out reaction is what you’d expect: awful mixed with stunned disbelief.

Pedantic perhaps, but what I'd expect would be the other way around, stunned disbelief mixed with awful. My reaction to the trailer isn't "my god, this looks awful," but rather more like "wait, hold on, this is still not a real actual thing, right?"

Still, at least it doesn't have Eddie Redmayne in it.

[domino harvey]

He’s reteamed this season with Felicity Jones in that balloon movie that’s about to stream for free on Amazon and is allegedly pretty entertaining

[nitin]

Supposedly Tom Hooper said at the premiere that he was still editing as of yesterday morning, which is always a good sign

Hooper’s answer to “Are you happy with how it looks?” is classic comedy:

https://mobile.twitter.com/Variety/stat ... 3563318272

[Luke M]

The reviews are out and are some of the funniest writings you'll read this week.

[therewillbeblus]

The titles of most of the articles alone are hilarious, and (apparently) more creative than anything in the film. I love a good trainwreck

[Big Ben]

This snippet from Michael Phillips zero star review from the Chicago Tribune sure is something:

Is it the worst film of 2019, or simply the most recent misfire of 2019? Reader, I swear on a stack of pancakes: “Cats” cannot be beat for sheer folly and misjudgment and audience-reaction-to-“Springtime for Hitler”-in-“The Producers” stupefaction.

[domino harvey]

There are way too many funny review lines, we'll be parsing these out for days, but here's a good one from the NYT

It's amazing to see what Adult Swim can accomplish with a $100 million budget.

[domino harvey]

The Guardian wrote their review in full-on Weird Al parody of the Naming of Cats

[movielocke]

La times

Curiously enough, for all this talk of digital fur technology, there appears to be no fur on the cats’ actual digits, their unnervingly human fingers and toes. And just to round out this nightmarish anatomy lesson, Hooper often directs his actors to splay their legs and bare their flat, undifferentiated crotches for the camera, none more frequently than Dench’s Old Neuteronomy herself.

[mfunk9786]

[Big Ben]

I had always had a hunch that it would be bad but I am just aghast at all of this. Why not delay the movie until it's finished? Surely it could have avoided all this heat if they waited I don't know, six months? Mind boggling that so much money was thrown at this project that now sounds like even it's director has grown apathetic towards it. Remarkable.

[The Curious Sofa]

It would be a matter of throwing good money after bad, because it’s conceptually misguided. Even with perfect CGI, these humanoid cat monsters will never look less than grotesque.

[Never Cursed]

I don't know if there was ever going to be a satisfactory "finished" state for this film, given how negatively its central conceit was received. It honestly makes a lot of sense to me that Hooper or the studio mandated a bunch of last-minute VFX changes and re-edits.

The thing that saddens me about this movie is that, considering how visible a failure Cats has become, I don't think we'll get another big-budget non-animated musical for a while after 2020 - here's hoping In The Heights or the West Side Story remake (shudder) are good/successful enough to change this trend...

[nitin]

You guys are awfully optimistic that this still won’t kill at the BO.