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Five years on from Cats’ disastrous cinema release, Tim Robey, the author of Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops, looks back on the most nightmarish vision of London to ever hit the big screen
I’ll never forget the London press screening of Cats. It was on December 17, 2019, on the same night that The Rise of Skywalker was also unveiled. Somehow, I did the double, back-to-back in Leicester Square, and still bear the scars.
The anti-hype for Cats was at fever pitch by then. Unlike Skywalker, it didn’t disappoint. Entire rows of critics were left agog. Like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, we felt strapped in and helpless, eyelids peeled back, while the nightmarish imagery paraded itself.
The trailers, which broke the internet that summer, had promised a horrorshow. It still took us all aback.
There was a photoshoot first in the Odeon foyer, the evidence of which survives. I pulled a cat face. Even at the eleventh, doomed hour, Universal hadn’t given up gamely injecting fun into their promotional efforts. There was alcohol – probably their only hope.
This was viral failure, memed everywhere, and penetrating mainstream reporting beyond even a Heaven’s Gate (1980). Certainly, it was the most infamous flop since Gigli (2003), and grossed approximately a quarter of what John Carter (2012) did worldwide.
Within about a week, it was noticed that Universal had quietly pulled the film from Oscar consideration on its website. Cats lore only grew. Jason Derulo felt moved to clarify that his crotch bulge had been CGI-ed out of the film. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who worked on it, and had stories.
The film’s trailers had promised a horrorshow. It still took us all aback
My favourite, which I heard in person, concerns the ballet-trained dancers hired to play the troupe of cockroaches in Rebel Wilson’s unforgettably gruesome number, The Old Gumbie Cat. On good authority, they had a dance-off after the casting process, and the winners of this were the lucky ones whose heads got bitten off.
The next morning, sheepish emails to the publicists had to break the bad news. It was only bad news. My editors scanned the review I’d filed, and strongly felt that the verdict was not reflected by the one star I’d bestowed. We agreed to remove it.
Was a zero too harsh? Almost certainly. But it raises a question. What’s the correct star rating for Cats? It fits into no known niche of quality. I can’t think of any one-star films I’ve now seen four times, and not many twos or threes, either. It’s simply beyond stars.
On release, I couldn’t shake the image of a few straggling Andrew Lloyd Webber fans keeping faith, maybe even indignantly, amid rude sensation hunters who had come in to get drunk and see how bad it could possibly be. A film marketed to families wound up being a site of experimentation for hundreds of millennials high on mushrooms. Who’d have guessed that it would be this generation’s ironic answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey?
It was a site of experimentation for millennials high on mushrooms
The Prince Charles Cinema was quick off the mark in identifying this growing cult, just as it had done for The Room (2003), Tommy Wiseau’s legendarily abysmal indie vanity project. Soon after the first run of Cats had petered out, the PCC catered to everyone’s ironic curiosity by arranging several singalong Jellicle Ball screenings. I couldn’t resist booking a ticket for one, but the pandemic put paid to it that March. (Conspiracy theorists had a field day with how hot on the heels of Cats Covid-19 was.)
Five years after first mewling on our doorsteps, Cats has gained pride of place in the pantheon of bad movies – and, specifically, bad London movies. That’s a crowded field. Much of the competition comes from the spate of Lottery-funded gangster flicks we had to endure in the wake of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. By ‘we’, I strictly mean film critics: if you remember seeing the likes of Rancid Aluminium (1999), You’re Dead (1999), or Love, Honour and Obey (2000), it was hopefully, for your sake, a professional obligation. Rhys Ifans is in literally all of those.
The pairing of Joanna Lumley and Anna Friel in Mad Cows (1999) did neither actress, or London, or any of the supermodels who turned up in cameos, any favours. Fat Slags (2004) needs no explication. The Sixties anti-classic Konga (1961) – essentially King Kong goes to Croydon High Street – is a credible threat.
No one is doing location tours for Cats
So is London Fields, the 2015 Martin Amis adaptation, starring Billy Bob Thornton and Amber Heard, which even the director agrees is rightly pegged with zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Johnny Depp has a cameo, scowling in a bowler hat as the facially scarred darts player ‘Chick Purchase’. That might be the one thing London Fields has over Cats.
For it is hard to banish Hooper’s final tableau, of Judi Dench and furry pals perched, gabbling, on a lion in Trafalgar Square, while a sign for Bovril blinks with bizarre intensity behind them. They’re still singing. They’re still dancing. Their interaction with the scenery, legs slightly off the ground, is macabre.
Harry Potter location tours might send families on a merry dance to Leadenhall Market and King’s Cross. No one’s doing this for Cats. It’s one big ‘Keep Out’ sign, fencing off a hellscape even more terrifying than the actual West End.
Tim Robey’s book Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops is published by Faber on Nov 7.