The much-hated
trailer suggests Tom Hooper’s musical will be a failure, but people said the same thing about Titanic and Snow White
Meow! The claws have been out for Cats since the first trailer dropped in July, prompting some 8m
YouTube hate-watches and a deluge of online snark and awe. Cats with breasts!
Taylor Swift with digital fur! Judi Dench with digital fur, wearing fur! Humans the size of cats the size of rats! It was the biggest collective WTF? of 2019. Cats-shaming brought us together.
None of which means that Tom Hooper’s wildly ambitious musical is actually going to be a disaster. Far from it. When it comes to predictions of movie failures, the public tends to have both a terrible track record and a conveniently short memory. Remember “Creepy Paddington”? The 2014 movie’s rendition of the cuddly bear – as a sort of photorealistic stalker from the uncanny valley – was greeted with a similar degree of gleeful disdain at first sighting. People began to insert Paddington into horror movie stills. Then the movie came out and it was a triumph, and everyone forgot about Creepy Paddington.