In adapting the exasperatingly long-running musical Cats, Les Misérables director Tom Hooper faced a unique challenge in how to bring the feline characters from the stage to the big screen. Make them photorealistic cats? Bipedal, more anthropomorphized cats? Stick with the original costumery that’s proved so iconic over nearly four decades?
Or, hey, what if those old costumes were cursed, and in taking them off the stage, they became living flesh that rendered their wearers revolting chimeras, equally cat and man, dancing lively yet not quite alive; the atrocious experiments of an aging gay Dr. Frankenstein driven mad from loneliness and the ammonia fumes of his off-Broadway studio apartment’s litter box?
“Yes,” said Hooper. “Let’s do that one.”
As seen in this first trailer for Hooper’s Cats, it seems that while Sonic the Hedgehog has been forced back to his seat in Hell, the eldritch magic of Mr. Mistoffelees has held the door open. Other atrocities have escaped.
Namely: Jennifer Hudson as Grizabella. Francesca Hayward as Victoria. Jason Derulo as Rum Tum Tugger. James Corden as Bustopher Jones. Respected British thespians Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, now covered in CGI fur and prancing through our nightmares. Idris Elba, once again saddled with being the guy with disconcertingly incongruous eyes. Taylor Swift as the cat you’ll reluctantly kind of want to fuck (you didn’t have to give her heels, Hooper). And, though it seems like it’s definitely a jokey bit from The Trip, somehow Ray Winstone is also in this thing. (“Imagine Ray Winstone has coughed [this hairball] up…”)
Cats will arrive like Toxoplasmosis, irrevocably screwing with our brains until our merciful deaths, this Christmas. In the meantime, here’s a cool behind-the-scenes clip:
