‘CATS’ GETS FIXED
Film flop ‘updated’
“Cats” is trying to claw its way out from the bottom.
The widely panned movie musical is being updated with better special effects, a report said.
As the flick opened on Friday, Universal Pictures sent out a memo notifying thousands of theaters that it planned to send an updated version of the film with “improved visual effects,” according to The Hollywood Reporter, which obtained a copy of the announcement.
Updating a film that has already been released is incredibly unusual, but insiders told the Reporter that it was done at director Tom Hooper’s request.
Hooper said at the premiere on Monday that he had finished the film only the day before after a 36hour cram session, Variety reported.
The film adaption of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s hit Broadway musical opened to a dismal $2.6 million box office on Friday.
It cost around $100 million to make and used “digital fur technology” to turn a star-studded cast — including Judi Dench, Taylor Swift and Idris Elba — into anthropomorphic felines.
But the CGI effects were slammed by many critics.
A.V. Club film critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky wrote that many of the effects “appear unfinished” with “noticeable differences in resolution and animation between principals and background character.”
And Variety deputy features editor Jenelle Riley pointed to a scene in which Dench, playing the sage feline Old Deuteronomy, appears with her bare hand instead of a furry paw.
“How do you know if you have the old version? Look for Judi Dench’s human hand, wedding ring and all,” Riley tweeted Sunday.
Others said the effects just looked bad.
In a review for NPR, Scott Tobias said the CGI should have been scrapped in the testing phase “when the skintight melding of faces and bodies with ‘digital fur technology’ looked glitchy and unsettling, like one of the ghosts from a Japanese horror movie.”
The Post’s own review described “dreadful CGIhuman hybrids that look worse than makeup.”
The updated version was scheduled to be available for cinemas to download on Sunday via a satellite server, while those without access will receive it by hard drive Tuesday, the Reporter said.