Cats Star Judy Dench Still Hasn't Seen the Movie

It has been nearly three months since the release of the disastrous live-action feature film adaptation of the musical Cats. The film quickly gained a reputation online and among film fans for having terrible visual effects and being an overall mess. Even the cast of the film made fun of the film with star James Corden making fun of it on The Late Late Show and with co-star Rebel Wilson at this year's Academy Awards. Now another member of the cast, Academy Award winner Dame Judi Dench, has revealed she also hasn't seen the movie nor has she read anything about the reaction.

"No, I haven't seen it," Dench said on BBC Radio 4's Front Row (H/T Evening Express). "I didn't read anything about the response to it, nor have I seen it, and I've only seen a picture of myself."

She also had a perplexing anecdote about her character and how it tied into her personal life, saying: "I once had a cat like that called Carpet – I didn't realise I was playing Carpet, I thought I was playing a really clapped out old, mangy old cat who didn't have much fur...I didn't realise I was this wonderful show cat."

Per a previous report on the film, the catastrophic box office for Cats put the film in a severe hole with the studio. The film cost around $95 million to make and is estimated to have spent around $115 million in global P&A. The film brought in a meager $27.1 million at the US box office with another $47.2 million internationally for a global total of $74 million, failing to recoup even just the production costs of the film.

Corden and Wilson's fun, candid approach to the outcome of Cats is much better than the one seen from musician Jason Derulo who appears in the film briefly and bashed the critics who had their own take downs of the film. Derulo, who has never been in a movie until Cats and appears in it very briefly, was caught on the sidewalk by TMZ last year where he opened up about his lack of interest in critics' work.

"Reviews don't matter, man," Derulo said. "At the end of the day, people are gonna go see it and it's gonna be a deportation into another dimension. It's an incredible, incredible, brave piece of art. It always has been that way. When it came out on Broadway, people were like, 'What is this?' It's something totally different. Any time that you defy what an art form is, any time you defy all rules, there's gonna be some pushback, obviously."

Cats has a home media release date set for the first part of April, which could be effected by the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus.