There are disasters, and then there are movies like Cats. Let’s just say that Tom Hooper’s adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is a rare breed, indeed. A comically awful film, probably going to go down as a cult favorite for that very reason, it has been destroyed by both critics and general audiences (C+ Cinemascore) in a rare example of total consensus. And then you get some shit like this, and you realize just how complete a failure this was from top to bottom…
— mike blacklist (@mike_blacklist) December 20, 2019
That’s right, Universal is sending an updated version of Cats to theaters with improved visual effects.
Cats is getting a day one patch. Like a shitty, buggy video game. Cats is the WWE 2K20 of studio movies.
How does something like this happen, when an unfinished movie hits over 3000 theaters and it looks so bad the studio has to rush out an improved version? Hooper told Variety at Tuesday’s red carpet premiere that he didn’t finalize the theatrical cut until “8 a.m. yesterday after 36 hours in a row.” Directors editing until the last minute is normal, but this is batshit for a movie of this scope.
This is so much worse than what happened with Sonic the Hedgehog‘s redesign. At least Sony was smart enough to fix that shit before it opened, and not after the fact. But it also shows us how easy it’s getting for these corrections to be made. Pretty soon it’ll really be like video games. If your movie sucks, just send a patch and fix what people are complaining about. [THR]
