It’s been almost one year since the release of Cats into theaters and though the movie bombed at the box office and became a critical laughing stock, the pandemonium that the movie unleashed on the world continues to this day. This March, four months after the film’s release, saw news make its way to the internet (and spread quickly) about there being a reported “butthole cut” of the film. As the story goes, the way that the CG skin and fur came together in some sections of the characters on screen resulted in what unintentionally looked like genitals and buttholes on most of the characters. VFX artists were reportedly hired to fix the issue, and Universal Pictures even released a statement on the matter.
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Now, one of the stars of Cats has been asked about the alternate “version” of the movie with James Corden laughing it off and saying he doesn’t think it would improve the film. “I don’t know, I haven’t seen it. I’ve not watched the film,” Corden said when asked about the “butthole cut” on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. “I think, either way, it probably can’t save that movie.”
Noted internet prankster Ben Mekler, whose tweets about Cats spawned the revelation of the “butthole cut,” shared an update from someone that worked in VFX on the film earlier this year.
“The task (as typical with heavy cg shows) fell on 2D to paint out the offending articles where it was brought up and spotted,” the source said. “Daily reviews were constant awkward discussions of people plucking up the courage to point things like this out; ‘does that look like a fanny to you?’”
It is perhaps unlikely that we’ll ever see the complete version of this cut of Cats because a complete version of the film with these errors in the CG probably doesn’t exist as a whole. Visual effects shots are often completed by different houses and screened in segments, so a complete version of the film with “skin and fur sim groomed or just folded in a way that really REALLY looked like very furry lady genitals and buttholes by accident” likely doesn’t exist.
We can only hope that Oscar winner Tom Hooper, the director of the notorious box office bomb, will join social media to offer cryptic teases about the eventual arrival of “the butthole cut” of Cats in the same way Zack Snyder’s posts on The Snyder Cut of Justice League heralded that film’s arrival.
