That's not true. Cats are very filmable. I've seen plenty of cats filmed that were great and held my attention. It's how these cats were filmed that stunk.
the choreography, camera, and editing are not the problem though
This movie was like a social experiment or something. I saw Jumanji: The Next Level with a really bad cold and had taken a lot of cold meds before the movie. Everything felt like it was happening faster than I could process and I wanted to just go to sleep. Jumanji: The Next Level is really entertaining though, so it led to a very unique experience: enjoying myself while physically feeling awful. Seeing Cats was exactly like my Jumanji experience. I think I want to own this movie.
This movie was like a social experiment or something. I saw Jumanji: The Next Level with a really bad cold and had taken a lot of cold meds before the movie. Everything felt like it was happening faster than I could process and I wanted to just go to sleep. Jumanji: The Next Level is really entertaining though, so it led to a very unique experience: enjoying myself while physically feeling awful. Seeing Cats was exactly like my Jumanji experience. I think I want to own this movie.
I posted a link to the Washington Post article on folk seeing Cats 'on drugs' in the Movie Thread - it's absolutely hysterical and appropriate way to experience this movie.
Improving the fx isn't gonna salvage the boneheaded creative decisions. Costumes and stage performers, was it that difficult to realize?
For disconnected-from-reality high up executives, YES!
IMO, they should have had cat heads+hands+feet but human bodies + clothing. Having naked human-hybrid cats running around was a bold choice but there are a lot of conservative people (or who think they are or pretending to be) out in the world.
Wow. When 4K discs get cancelled (or not announced to begin with) for smaller movies that tanked I can see why, but when they do it for something as high profile and as costly as this it surprises me because you'd think they'd want to try and claw back (miaow!) as much moolah as possible for the home release. Universal's own Mortal Engines was almost as much of a box office disaster as this but it still got UHD, 3D etc, though perhaps that didn't end up making a dent in the deficit which is why they're cutting their losses with Cats? Especially because Engines might well have been seen to appeal to home video nerds whereas Cats' target audience probably doesn't give a crap about 4K.
So, they each ate a chocolate candy infused with 5 milligrams of cannabis. They didn’t feel anything after a while, so they smoked a bit, too.
The pair arrived at the theater and settled into their seats.
“I’m feeling kind of okay” at that point, Sarah says, “like maybe I can get through this.” Then, just as the first frame of the movie came up, “I feel, like, a spot on the center of my forehead light up and start tingling, and it radiates throughout my whole body.”
Uh-oh.
“And I was like, ‘Oh, God, can I do this?’ ”
To be clear, The Washington Post does not endorse illicit drug use. And for most people, “Cats” is unnerving enough sober. It tells the story of a group of singing, dancing alley cats who compete for the chance to go to the Heaviside Layer, a metaphor for death and rebirth into the next of their nine lives. Critics have described the movie adaptation — which features a parade of superstars (Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Taylor Swift, Jennifer Hudson, James Corden and others) rendered as uncanny human-cat hybrids — as a feverish drug dream, a bad trip. It is expected to lose as much as $100 million, according to Variety.
But those reviews have been a siren call for people who believe they know how to salvage an irretrievably weird movie, at least for themselves: by doing drugs first.
Hundreds of people told The Post their stories about seeing “Cats” while high — some on marijuana, others on psilocybin mushrooms, LSD and other mind-altering substances.
Here are their reviews:
“The most incredible cinematic experience of my life.”
“The most terrifying experience of my life. I swear to God my soul escaped me.”
“Cried both times. Planning on going two more times.”
“Vomited four times but ultimately understood the film on a deep level.”
“Had a panic attack in the middle of it . . . right after Taylor Swift sang ‘Macavity.’ ”
“When Judi Dench turned and looked me directly in the eyes to let me know that a cat is not a dog, I was terrified.”
It was unclear, on balance, whether getting high made “Cats” better, or much, much worse. Certainly, it seemed to raise the emotional stakes. One person reported bursting into tears before the film even started, during a trailer for “Trolls World Tour.”
Recreational marijuana is legal in 11 states and the District, and a number of the people interviewed for this story asked that their full names be withheld — either because marijuana was not legal in their state or because they worried about professional repercussions. But going to “Cats” stoned seemed to be something people were doing, and sure enough, an open call on Twitter yielded a deluge of testimonials.
Annaliese Nielsen, who owns a cannabis brand in Los Angeles, used a strain of weed calibrated for relaxation, but found herself unable to relax in a dark theater illuminated by the ghastly cat face of Corden. “I’m 36 and announced, ‘I’m scared!’ to my fellow moviegoers at least seven times,” says Nielsen, who called the film “a special kind of evil.”
Charlotte Clymer, 33, an LGBTQ activist in Washington, ate THC-infused gummy candies before her screening, and also found the movie terrifying. “Three-quarters of the way through the movie,” she says, “I was like, ‘I hope I don’t hate my own cats when I get home.’ ”
Raina, a 25-year-old from South Carolina, also ate gummies. She could not get past the mismatched proportions of the cats in the film. Sometimes they were cat-sized, sometime they were human-sized, and sometimes they appeared to be the size of mice.
She made it 10 minutes, she says, “and then I went to the AMC bathroom and threw up.”
Soon after the tingling feeling started in her forehead, Sarah, the 26-year-old from Louisville, realized that she and her roommate had made a miscalculation. The humanlike cats (catlike humans?) were grotesque. Sarah couldn’t stop staring at their feet. Er, paws. No, hands. “Where their fur ends and their human hands start, it would move in a weird unnatural way,” she says. At one point, Jennyanydots, the cat played by Rebel Wilson, eats dancing cockroaches who have human faces, in a “horrifying” scene.
“I felt like I was losing my mind,” Sarah says. “I was just concentrating on taking deep breaths.”
But then there are the people for whom “Cats” under the influence was positively moving.
“I was so delighted,” says Kat (yes, her real name), a 32-year-old in Los Angeles. “I was like, ‘Is this genius? Is this the best thing I have ever seen?’ ”
“I had a realization partway through that I am the only person in the world who understands ‘Cats,’ ” says Kate, 31, a medical researcher in Chicago, who soon found herself plotting a “Cats”-based doctoral thesis while still in the theater: She would examine the class dialectic of 1930s London (when T.S. Eliot wrote the poems that inspired “Cats”), the late ’80s heyday of Webber and police brutality in 2019.
“It doesn’t sound as groundbreaking now,” Kate says, “but please remember I was very stoned.”
In New York, a 26-year-old man named Ryan, who messaged The Post while still high on the edibles he took for that evening’s screening, expressed his lust for “a particular cat I would love to do bad things to me.” (It was Munkustrap, played by chiseled ballet dancer Robbie Fairchild).
In Michigan, a 33-year-old man named Zachary, also on edibles, wrestled with his own attraction to the cat version of Swift. (“Her face still looks like Taylor Swift,” he tells The Post — and also, it seems, himself. “But no, she’s a monster.”)
A 40-year-old Washingtonian named Danielle found herself confounded — first in an academic way, then in a giggling-uncontrollably way — by the below-the-belt anatomies of the creatures on-screen.
In Seattle, a 26-year-old teacher named Dan ate a 20-milligram THC caramel and popped on his headphones to see if “Cats” would sync up with Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon,” like “The Wizard of Oz” is supposed to do, according to stoner lore. If you spin the album twice, Dan reports, McKellen’s performance of “Gus: The Theatre Cat” aligns perfectly with “The Great Gig in the Sky.”
In Los Angeles, a 23-year-old actor named Davis, who went to the movie with some friends, took a huge hit of amyl nitrite (i.e. “poppers”) at a key moment. “It was literally as Jennifer [Hudson] screams out, ‘Touch meeeeee, it’s so easy to leave meeeeeee,’ the poppers for all three of us kicked in,” he says. “I felt myself hit the Heaviside Layer like Grizabella, the glamour cat.”
Could “Cats,” dead on arrival with critics and mass audiences, ascend to the Heaviside Layer to be reborn as a stoner classic? There’s talk that the movie could be the next “Rocky Horror Picture Show,” a cult film from 1975 that still inspires audiences to dress up as the characters and yell at the screen. On Twitter, someone posted video of an audience member in a cat suit dancing along to the credits. Some theaters, like the Alamo Drafthouse, are hosting “rowdy” screenings of “Cats” where people — many in various states of inebriation — are encouraged to yell at the screen. Other screenings not explicitly designated as “rowdy” are becoming communal experiences nonetheless — or, perhaps, mass trauma events.
One “Cats” viewer who ate a THC-infused caramel, a 43-year-old Tony-award-winning Broadway producer in New York, described a “bonding experience” with other attendees in the sparsely populated theater: “Just like, okay, we’re doing this together, this is a thing that is transpiring, and we are bearing witness.”
The precise moment when he “punctured the looking glass” happened toward the end of the movie, following the kidnapping of Old Deuteronomy, played by Dench. When Mr. Mistoffelees, the magician cat, “conjured Judi Dench back, and she sang his tune for the 900th time,” he says, “I lost touch with what we understand is reality. At that point, the rest of the audience was in gales of laughter as well, and then it was just a slide down the chute of hysteria to the end.”
When they left the theater, “there was just silence, no one had words,” says the Broadway producer. “No one could name what had happened to us.”
This is not news - the 4k UHD page for Amazon got delisted a week or two ago, it's not exactly new. It's still however in Amazon Canada and and Germany and Australia.
Honestly we'll have to see how this goes, but regardless of how much of a bomb it was I'm seriously wondering how would they skip 4K altogether, when it was shot in 4K. And as mentioned earlier, Mortal Engines bombed and it got everything.
Not only that but it wouldn't be the first movie that bombs hard in box office but gets a little better in streaming/physical.. but I guess best we can do is wait a month or two more or until Universal's official press release.
It's still up for pre-order at zoom in the UK too. Could well be that they're going to do a 4K disc anyway and just aren't going to release it in the US? Wouldn't be the first time a studio did this, e.g. Sony and the new Dragon Tattoo movie (which I've completely forgotten the name of, lol).
Mortal Engines' loses were almost double what Cats is going to lose: $175 million compared to $71–100 million(as per Wiki).
I do agree with Geoff however, in that Mortal Engines looks like a much more appealing home video purchase when it comes to the general public; I can't imagine your average Joe seeing Cats in the "new release" section and deciding to pick up the 4K version.
When it comes to 4K releases, Universal's policy seems to be more on "would the audience of this movie be interested in a 4K version" and not on how well it performed, as even hits like Downton Abbey, The Upside or Last Christmas haven't gotten a UHD release.
This movie was like a social experiment or something. I saw Jumanji: The Next Level with a really bad cold and had taken a lot of cold meds before the movie. Everything felt like it was happening faster than I could process and I wanted to just go to sleep. Jumanji: The Next Level is really entertaining though, so it led to a very unique experience: enjoying myself while physically feeling awful.
If you were that sick you should've stayed home. Those movies were not that important for you to go see while spreading your germs and giving it to everybody around you. Are you sure you had a cold and not the flu? I wouldn't go to work if I was that sick, lest go to see a movie!
Mortal Engines' loses were almost double what Cats is going to lose: $175 million compared to $71–100 million(as per Wiki).
I do agree with Geoff however, in that Mortal Engines looks like a much more appealing home video purchase when it comes to the general public; I can't imagine your average Joe seeing Cats in the "new release" section and deciding to pick up the 4K version.
When it comes to 4K releases, Universal's policy seems to be more on "would the audience of this movie be interested in a 4K version" and not on how well it performed, as even hits like Downton Abbey, The Upside or Last Christmas haven't gotten a UHD release.
Something is certain, they'll release the 4K streaming. But streaming still will never reach the quality of physical 4k blu ray.
If you were that sick you should've stayed home. Those movies were not that important for you to go see while spreading your germs and giving it to everybody around you. Are you sure you had a cold and not the flu? I wouldn't go to work if I was that sick, lest go to see a movie!
I wish you would take your own advice here every time you think about posting.
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