Oh Hollywood, look what you made Taylor Swift do.
The pop star is joining the likes of Jennifer Hudson, Sir Ian McKellen and, god diggity dammit, James Corden in director Tom Hooper’s take on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, that T.S. Eliot-inspired musical about alley cats that could only have appeared from a mind as corrupt as the one that wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” What an absolute nightmare from top to bottom. This is ostensibly the result of a coked-up Hollywood exec assuming that simply because people know a thing, they’ll pay good money to see it on screen (and after The Greatest Showman did so well, they’re looking for something with box office endurance).
We’re going to join the crowd of voices shitting on this decision from top to bottom — there was a reason Cats died back in the ’90s, and it wasn’t because it was too good to live — and it’s absolutely stunning that Hooper (a.k.a. shitty Kubrick) has now become the chronicler of ’80s Broadway on screen. Make no mistake: He sucks, with The Danish Girl being one of the most deeply and broadly offensive Hollywood films released in the last five years, and his take on Les Misérables is one of the most bizarre big-budget musicals ever released, which might have been interesting had it not been filmed in fucking close-up.
No word on whether this is going to be CGI or if they’re literally going to put Taylor Swift in whiskers, though it’s planning on filming in London in November. Sorry, but we just have no fucking clue why this is getting made, or what person, outside of a child who didn’t live through the Cats mania of the ’80s and ’90s — assuming that they’re not being held at gunpoint by a particularly sadistic terrorist — would want to see this.
Stay tuned for more, including a release date (we’re guessing late 2019, though). Or don’t! That’s your god-given right, to not pay attention to Tom Hooper.
Featured image via Decca Broadway.