When a rumor surfaced that Tom Hooper’s Cats, one of the most humiliatingly viral films in history, had a cut featuring CGI buttholes on feline bods, didn’t you just know it HAD to be true? I mean, this is a movie that was already about as misguided as it gets, what’s one more embarrassment to heap on it? Well, now we know…the butthole cut was real.
The Daily Beast has the inside story on the Cats butthole cut, noting a source who worked on the movie’s visual effects. The poor beleaguered butthole-spotter says the movie was halfway finished before anyone noticed, and that brought things to a screeching halt…
“We paused it,” the source said. “We went to call our supervisor, and we’re like, ‘There’s a fucking asshole in there! There’s buttholes!’ It wasn’t prominent but you saw it… And you [were] just like, ‘What the hell is that?… There’s a fucking butthole in there.’ It wasn’t in your face—but at the same time, too, if you’re looking, you’ll see it.”
Yes, you tend to see buttholes when they’re made visible. And once you see them, you can’t unsee them. So it was probably a good idea to have some sad sad person remove them, although the source does say nobody outright ordered the buttholes into existence. While that may be true, multiple producers (and likely Hooper, too) had to have signed off on the cats’ complete look, buttholes included.
Speaking of Hooper, he apparently was a huge hindrance to the VFX team. His misunderstanding of how effects work, and poor treatment of others is said to have made an overall “horrible” experience.
“Before visual effects artists fully render sequences for animated films, they normally show directors playblasts—preview renderings that feature characters without color or texture. That allows the director to evaluate the motion before hours of work are done to flesh out things like color, texture, and lighting. Hooper, however, did not seem to grasp that process. Any time the visual effects team wanted to show the director any animatics, the source said, they had to fully render it. Otherwise, he’d say things like, “What’s this garbage?” and “I don’t understand— where’s the fur?””
So Cats is available on digital now. If you want to watch it and imagine Tom Hooper angrily screaming about the lack of sphincters, feel free.
