The movie adaptation of the Lloyd Webber musical appalled viewers when its first
trailer launched four months ago. Now a new one is here, has it improved things?
Four months. It’s been four months since Tom Hooper debuted his vision for the film adaptation of Cats. Four months of waking ourselves with wordless screams in the night. Four months of physically recoiling upon hearing words that even vaguely sound like the word “cats – like “bats” and “cans” and “kids”. Four long months of running up to strangers in the streets, grabbing them by the shoulders and screaming “Why? Why do all the cats look like they’ve been Brundleflied into little sacks of pubes?”
Those four months have done a lot of work. Universal Pictures has hurled a self-aware
Twitter account at the film, in the hope that we might eventually be convinced that this whole nightmare is all just some sort of ironic joke. Plus, you can get used to a lot in four months. Verrucas, missing teeth, full-scale military-assisted regime change, that sort of thing. Surely – surely! – we’d all use those four months to normalise the hideous sexy-cats-wearing-the-fur-of-their-own-relatives aesthetic of Tom Hooper’s Cats.