Things were simpler back in 2019. The pandemic hadn’t hit yet, and the only thing people had to fear were the terrifying, dancing felines in Tom Hooper’s Cats. The movie was a massive flop, having cost $95 million to make but only earned $73,695,985 million worldwide. The movie is currently up on Rotten Tomatoes with a 20% critics score and a 53% audience score. While Cats may have failed as a movie, it was an incredibly successful stage show. At one point, it was the longest-running show on Broadway, which is a title that now belongs to The Phantom of the Opera. One thing both shows have in common? Andrew Lloyd Webber. The composer has had many successes in his life, but the Cats movie was not one of them. In fact, he recently revealed to Variety that he coped with the flop by getting a dog (a real blow to cats everywhere).
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“Cats was off-the-scale all wrong,” Lloyd Webber shared. “There wasn’t really any understanding of why the music ticked at all. I saw it and I just thought, ‘Oh, God, no.’ It was the first time in my 70-odd years on this planet that I went out and bought a dog. So the one good thing to come out of it is my little Havanese puppy.”
“I wrote off and said I needed him with me at all times because I’m emotionally damaged and I must have this therapy dog,” Lloyd Webber added when talking about wanting to bring his new pup on a plane. “The airline wrote back and said, ‘Can you prove that you really need him?’ And I said ‘Yes, just see what Hollywood did to my musical Cats.’ Then the approval came back with a note saying, ‘No doctor’s report required.’”
Last year, the Cats saga took a wild turn with the roller coaster ride that was the existence of the “Butthole Cut.” Jack Waz, a writer in Hollywood and Twitter personality, revealed he heard third hand of the existence of a version of the film that featured “CGI buttholes that had been inserted.” Waz revealed that a friend-of-a-friend had been hired to remove said buttholes months ahead of the release of the film. The existence of this alternate version was seemingly debunked by someone else that worked on the series, and Universal Pictures officially commented on the matter.
Cats is now available for home viewing… if you dare.
