Few film trailers genuinely electrify the internet. Yet on Thursday night, first footage from Tom Hooper’s adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats did exactly that.
“Some of the creepiest stuff I’ve ever seen on screen,” wrote one viewer. “I don’t have words to describe how uncomfortable I am after watching this,” added another. “Did I take drugs and forget about it?” asked one of the millions who watched in the trailer’s first 12 hours of release. A brave few stayed sanguine: “I don’t know why you’re all freaking out over miniature yet huge cats with human celebrity faces and sexy breasts performing a demented dream ballet for kids.”
Hooper’s film has long been fancied to repeat – or even better – the success of his Les Misérables, which won three Oscars and took £353m in 2012. And since Cats was first announced three years ago, anticipation has only mounted. A first-class cast was wrangled, including Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Idris Elba and Taylor Swift. During the shoot, Swift excitedly revealed that she and her fellow actors were attending “cat school” to seem more feline. Reports of the pioneering “digital fur technology” that would be used in post-production were lapped up eagerly.
But the collective hairball that met the trailer has readjusted expectations and rewritten the conversation – with the film’s special effects singled out for particular criticism (“That CGI looks like something my actual cat vomits up”). Viewers have queried the wisdom of transmogrified actors apparently retaining their own noses - and, in some cases, genitals. Dismayingly located tails added to the confusion, as did the cat-fur coat sported by Dench’s already hirsute Old Deuteronomy.
Yet rather than licking its wounds, Universal Studios, which has sunk an estimated £230m into its big winter holiday release, is likely to be quietly purring. The film’s Oscar hopes may have been spayed, but its box office prospects rarely looked healthier. Aficionados of the stage show were already guaranteed to turn out in herds; the catastrophe teased on Thursday means even people with a professed Cats allergy have had their appetites whetted. The film is now being billed as a must-see for the hate-watch crowd, who tend to head to cinemas en masse, on repeat and with a drink in their hand.
And this is exactly the demographic targeted with increasing desperation not just by studios and distributors but multiplex owners and the chains that run their concession stalls. Two companies currently dominate cinema: Disney and Netflix. The latter keeps people indoors with so-so fare such as Bird Box and Murder Mystery. The former manages to coax them out by only making movies that demand to be seen on the big screen. Disney’s market share is currently more than a third and growing, thanks entirely to event cinema such as the Avengers movies and Star Wars, whose ninth episode will be Cats’ biggest competition this Christmas.
Universal knows that a ticket is still a ticket even if it’s been bought by rubbernecker. And it’s not the only one. Earlier on Thursday, Paramount Pictures dropped the first look for Top Gun: Maverick, the belated Tom Cruise sequel, 34 years after the release of the original. Another prime cut of spectacle cinema, in which Paramount will have placed considerable hopes – and funds.
But by Friday morning, there was little talk of Top Gun 2 – on Twitter, at least. The return of the biggest film star in the world to his most-loved role had been scorched by the sight of Judi Dench in whiskers.
