Cats Director Tom Hooper Defends Film After Critical Reaction

Cats has been dazzling and perplexing audiences around the world for decades now on the stage, and the feature film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit show will finally debut in theaters this Friday to make movie goers scratch their heads too. Since the first trailer for the film arrived the movie has been getting the side eye from the internet with an eager dose of outright mockery. In the end this turned out to be a good thing, or so director Tom Hooper says, revealing the criticisms allowed him to realize his over-thinking his approach to the movie.

“I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, and it was obviously much more of a big deal than I thought,” Hooper said in an interview with EW. “Reading some of the commentary was pretty entertaining.”

After the first trailer, Hooper revealed that the “feedback” was used to literally redesign “every single cat” in the movie. They all had varying degrees of changes following the outcry with some getting smaller changes and others receiving major face lifts, literally. The faces were the main area that Hooper focused on improving after the first trailer reactions.

“I think probably my original dream to use a lot of the human face had gotten perhaps a bit lost in that process of rushing to make that first trailer…I really concentrated on bringing back the actors’ faces because when you’ve got Ian McKellen or Judi Dench or Taylor Swift, why would you not want to? I don’t know if that’s what the comments were asking for, but what I took from it was that I needed to reconnect with my original plan and make sure I was delivering on that.”

It remains to be seen how audiences will react to Cats when it is release this Friday, but as of this writing the Rotten Tomatoes critical score for the film is sitting at a dismal 14% after 49 total reviews (with more still to follow). Our own Charlie Ridgley reviewed the film, giving it a 1 out of 5 score, saying: “Perhaps the most unhinged and outlandish movie to hit theaters in as long as I can remember, Cats is a brave, bold failure that needs to be seen in order to be believed. The fact that it actually exists the way it does is absurd, even before seeing how poorly it all works together.”

Cats arrives in theaters on Friday December 20th.