The trailer for Cats: the public gets its claws out
“The worst thing about having a mistress,” went a joke popular at the time, “is that you have to see Cats twice.” Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, based on T.S. Eliot’s collection of poems Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, was a huge hit in the 1980s despite a fair dose of critical scorn, said Alice Vincent in The Daily Telegraph. And now there is to be a film version with a starry cast including Taylor Swift, James Corden, Idris Elba and Judi Dench.
The movie isn’t out until December, said Paul Glynn on BBC News, but to judge from the incredulous reaction to the trailer last week, it’s in for a critical mauling. “Did I take drugs and forget about it?” tweeted one bewildered member of the public. “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,” tweeted another. I’ve so many questions, said Stuart Heritage in The Guardian, but above all this: why does Dench’s character wear a matching fur coat over her own fur? “Did she seek out cats with identical fur to hers – maybe even her own relatives – and brutally skin them so she could wear them as a garment?” I’m amazed at the amazement, said Anoosh Chakelian in the New Statesman. It’s not as if the stage show, with its zany plot and actors in cat costumes doing “highly sexualised” dances, wasn’t equally weird.
Besides, said Paul Glynn, a trailer trashing need not spell disaster: the trailers for Avatar and The Greatest Showman also met with derision, yet those films went on to be smashes. Actually, as far as Universal, the studio behind Cats, is concerned, the extreme response to the trailer is just the ticket, said Catherine Shoard in The Guardian. The movie has now become a must-see for “the hate-watch crowd” as well as fans of the musical. Universal must be “purring” with pleasure.