I Have Seen Cats (2019) Four Times

“These are people, but they’re cats.”

James Corden gave that infamous quote, infamous to me at least, a few months before the release of Cats. Few words have ever been as true and as frightening as those. Yes, the characters were cats. Yes, they were people. They were a weird blending of people and cats that was sure to fuel the nightmares of the audience members who witnessed the film. James Corden sounded so genuinely enthused to be working in the motion capture world inspired by the Andrew Lloyd Weber stage musical.

Cats was directed by Tom Hooper, fresh off the success of his film adaptation of the Les Misérables stage musical. Victoria (Francesca Hayward) was a cat dumped in an alleyway by people who no longer wanted her. She was quickly brought into the world of the jellicle ball, overseen by Old Deuteronomy (Judi Dench). A few cats competed to become the next jellicle cat, including the evil Macavity (Idris Elba), a cat with magical powers who whisked his competition away to the middle of the Thames.

If that doesn’t make much sense, don’t worry. It won’t make any more sense by the end of this post. Cats doesn’t make a whole lot of sense and trying to make sense of it doesn’t work. No matter how hard you try, it won’t work. You will never understand it. That’s just a fact.

I was in Los Angeles in late November 2019. A documentary I produced was part of a film festival and I flew out to see it play in the Chinese Theater. How often do you get to see your own movie play there? This isn’t about that, though. This is about Cats. When I was in Los Angeles, Cats was only a month from being released. If there was even that much time left. There were two movies getting a lot of poster space around Hollywood. Queen & Slim was featured at nearly all the bus stops. I had no idea what the movie was. I have since seen it and it was great. The other movie was Cats. Queen & Slim got the bus stops. Cats got the big signage. Cats got the billboards. Cats got the building faces. It was going to be a big movie. At least, they wanted it to be a big movie.

I’m currently sitting at my laptop, typing this up, knowing that Cats was a big movie. It was big for all the wrong reasons. It has one of the worst reputations of any movie from the past five, maybe ten years. I don’t know a single person who saw Cats and liked Cats. Those people aren’t out there. From what I’ve seen. There might be someone, somewhere, who actually liked the movie. I haven’t heard about that.

Go back to 2019. It was Christmas. People started to see Cats and the reviews were coming out. Mistakes were made with the movie. It had been rushed to release for the holidays. Why? There’s no real reason that it had to come out at the holidays other than that it was scheduled to. Guess what? They didn’t finish it in time. People who went to see it complained about unrendered effects. There were grey cats in the background of scenes who hadn’t been given fur or other features. Judy Dench’s wedding ring could be seen, even through she was an unmarried cat. Things like those were reasons that the movie shouldn’t have been rushed to theaters.

In one of the strangest reactions that I’ve seen from a studio after being told that their movie had problems, a patch was sent to theaters. It was like a video game working out various bugs through updates after the beta testing. Only, Cats wasn’t being tested. It was a movie that had already been wide released. This was the only time I ever heard of this happening. An already released movie was being given a patch to fix effects issues that hadn’t been solved before the release. Instead of simply delaying the release by a week or two, they released the unfinished product then released a fix for some of the issues.

I have never seen the unpatched version of Cats. I didn’t see the movie within the first week of release. Once the patch was released, they buried the original version. There was no reason to have that version out there when a better version was available. I’m left wondering what seeing that version would be like. Would I enjoy it more or less? Do I need to see it? I don’t know if I need to see it. I don’t know if I ever need to see Cats again. I think I’ve seen it enough times for a lifetime.

The first time I saw Cats was as a joke. Everyone at work had heard about how bad the movie was. Word of mouth was overly negative. I kept asking, as a joke, if anyone wanted to go see it. Nobody wanted to. Every time I asked, very annoyingly since it was constant for about a week, they said no. I expected that. I wasn’t intending to see the movie. I knew people were going to say they didn’t want to see it. Then one of them agreed to see it. I couldn’t back out of the bit. I needed to commit. Commit to the bit. So I headed off to the theater to see Cats.

That experience was one that I’ll never forget. It was two or three weeks after the release of Cats. There were only about twelve people in the theater. None of us knew exactly what we were in for. We knew it would be bad, but within the first five minutes, people were moaning. Nobody knew what a jellicle was. Questions were flying around. People were saying “Oh no!” There were cries of pain. You might think that this is an exaggeration. It’s not. Everyone was making some sort of reactionary noise to the movie. None of it was good. And it lasted the entire runtime.

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced another movie in the theater like that. I’ve been to horror movies where people screamed. I’ve also been to horror movies where people cheered. The end of Get Out had a moment where the breath went out of the entire theater, before people started clapping and whooping. But that was one moment. It wasn’t the entire movie. With Cats, the reactions were happening throughout. It wasn’t a one moment or another moment thing. The audience was reacting the whole time. Never have I seen that level of reaction to a movie. Never before and never since.

The second time I saw Cats, the audience was a little different. So was the setting. It was no longer in theaters. A theatrical excursion was out of the question. It was also the beginning of the pandemic, which meant that it would be tough to get to the theater in the middle of a lockdown. It wasn’t open. Oddly enough, our province is going into another theater-closing pandemic stage again right now. A group of friends wanted to check the movie out. One of them rented it and opened up a discord channel. We all signed into the channel and watched the movie together. Two of us had seen it before. The rest were going into it for the first time.

Much of the second watch was about witnessing other people’s reactions to how strange the movie was. The mice and cockroaches, which appear early in the film, were a particular point of no return for people. They saw what those looked like and knew that they were in for something special. Was it a good special? Not particularly. But they knew that there was no turning back. A movie like Cats was something they had never seen before. Things only continued to go downhill as they questioned who every character was and the friend who rented it listed off names. Names that I now know most of, by the way. I have seen Cats enough to know the names.

You have Victoria, Old Deuteronomy (who we started calling Old Deuts), and Macavity. There’s also Rum Tum Tugger (Jason Derulo), Munkustrap (Robbie Fairchild), Mr. Mistoffelees (Laurie Davidson), Mungojerrie (Danny Collins), Rumpleteazer (Naoimh Morgan), Growltiger (Ray Winstone), Gus the Theatre Cat (Ian McKellen), Bustopher Jones (James Corden), Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson), Grizabella (Jennifer Hudson), and Skimbleshanks (Steven McRae). Taylor Swift also played some cat who I think might not even be named in the movie, but is named Bombalurina. Plus, there are a bunch of other, smaller, supporting characters who don’t get big songs to shine.

The third time I saw Cats was with a friend who was curious about whether it was as bad as he heard. I went to his place to watch a couple bad movies one afternoon before another friend joined us and we played some board games. The first movie we threw in was Cats, to get it over with. It was a rip-the-bandaid sort of thing, though I had long since ripped and was just repeatedly poking the scab by that point. He had a few questions about the movie, namely on things I didn’t know the answers to. What did it mean? What is a jellicle? Why does Victoria spend most of the movie just longingly looking at the other cats? I didn’t know then. I still don’t know now. It’s just Cats. That’s the best answer I have. We then watched Champagne and Bullets, aka Geteven, aka Road to Revenge and things got a whole lot more fun.

Now I have seen the movie a fourth time. Four times. I have sat down to watch Cats four different times. Am I a broken person? Some people might say so. Do I hate myself? Sometimes, yeah. Why would I subject myself to this movie four times? Here’s one explanation. You know how people say that when they take a drug, they always chase that first high? I think it’s something like that.

My first experience watching Cats was such a unique experience that I’ve been chasing it ever since. Watching it with friends is my attempt to live vicariously through their first watch experience. I know what to expect. It still sends me for a loop, but I know what will be coming up. I didn’t during my first watch. My friends didn’t during their first watches. Watching Cats with them, I get some of the contact first time watch. I get a little bit of their experience of seeing the movie for the first time. Some of that feeling comes back to me.

That wasn’t there with the most recent watch. I watched Cats solely for the purpose of writing this post. I turned it into work, and it felt like a chore to get through it. Maybe it was also the lack of having anyone else watching with me. I couldn’t vicariously get the contact first time watch. I could only watch it for the fourth time, wondering why I chose to watch it four times. My answer, my justification, is that I watched it for this blog. I watch bad movies for this. Cats is a bad movie. There’s no denying that. I was going to watch it sooner or later. I decided to make it sooner.

I don’t know the next time I’ll watch Cats. I don’t know if I’ll actually ever watch it again. That’s up in the air. I own the Blu-ray. I could watch it whenever I want to. Will I ever have the urge? Don’t know. All I can say is that four times in two years was enough for me for the time being. Those faces on those cat heads on the human bodies with cat fur and cat tails… those images are etched in my mind. They are people, but they’re cats. And they are nightmare fuel.

Now for a few notes to close things out:

• Road to Revenge (week 313) was mentioned in the post.
• Cats was the third Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance for Jennifer Hudson, who was previously in Sandy Wexler (week 231) and Sex and the City (week 370).
• Judi Dench played Old Deuteronomy in Cats. She also played M in Die Another Day (week 153).
• Taylor Swift returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in Cats after first being featured in Valentine’s Day (week 168).
• Two actors from the Ghost Rider franchise were featured in Cats. Rebel Wilson was in Ghost Rider (week 260) and Idris Elba was in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (week 260).
• Finally, Bustopher Jones himself, James Corden was in Cats and The Emoji Movie (week 373).
• Have you seen Cats? What did you think? Have you seen it more than once? Why? Let me know your thoughts and experiences on Twitter or in the comments.
• You can drop any suggestions you might have about movies I should be watching into the comments, or you can tell me all about the movies on Twitter. I’m open to all suggestions, and many of them make it into the schedule.
• Make sure to give Instagram a peek for more Sunday “Bad”Movies fun.
• That does it for this week of Sunday “Bad” Movies. Make sure to come back next week for more bad movie fun as I cover the Sylvester Stallone classic, Over the Top. You know, the one that is basically just Real Steel with arm wrestling instead of robot boxing. That’s the one. It will be the subject of next week’s post. Or, it will be part of the subject, at least. I don’t know what I’m going to write yet. I’ll see you then, though. Bye!