Still shook about "Cats" becoming a movie
Wednesday, July 25, 2018 at 10:25PM by Nathaniel R
Betty Buckley in her Tony-winning role as "Grizabella, the glamour cat"By now you've heard the comic news (oh no wait, they're serious!) that "Cats" is being turned into a movie. The news took me so off guard that I was silent for five days. Cats got my tongue. (I'm sorry). The Andrew Lloyd Webber megahit from the 1980s was based on T.S. Elliott poems and as such it has no real story to speak of. It's basically a very successful song cycle (albeit with only one famous song "Memory") elevated by utter nonrealism in the form of humans pretending to be cats in campy makeup, tights, and acrobatic dancing. It's so hard to imagine as a movie that they made the potential of the making of one into a running joke in the play turned movie Six Degrees of Separation (1993).
Grizabella the glamour cat is the marquee role but, in fact, it's a "featured" role since it's truly an ensemble show...
She was played by theatrical legends like Betty Buckley, Elaine Page, and Judi Dench in the 1980s but new producers have moved away from theatrical divas and toward reality competition singers with big pipes...
Both recent revivals in the UK and US went with reality show competition singers (Leona Lewis and Nicole Scherzinger) as Grizabella and they're repeating that move for the movie version via Jennifer Hudson. This will be JHud's second opportunity to take the key role in a big stage hit and immortalize its most famous song in movie form. You may remember what happened last time she did that... though it's hard to imagine Cats as a movie being taken seriously enough to win Oscars.
Judi Dench as Grizabella
This probably sounds like I do not like Cats which is not really true. I have nostalgic affection for it. I had the record and t-shirt as a kid and it was the first show I ever saw on Broadway as a typical tourist long before I moved here. But it would take real creative chutzpah and genius imagination to adapt it sufficiently to cinema to make it work at all.
The musical will also star Taylor Swift (role unknown), James Corden (role unknown), and Sir Ian McKellen as "Old Deuteronomy" and more stars yet to be announced. If they're already casting we assume they're filming in late 2018 or early 2019 so perhaps the movie comes out in 2020.
Apologies if this has been discussed to death, but...
— Mark Blankenship (@IAmBlankenship) July 25, 2018
In the film version of "Six Degrees of Separation," Ian McKellen plays a character who is ensorcelled by the idea of being in a film version of "Cats."
And now Ian McKellen will be in the film version of "Cats."
Tom Hooper (Les Miz, The King's Speech) will direct because for some reason Hollywood only lets three men direct movie musicals: Tom Hooper, Rob Marshall, and Bill Condon even though none of them have proven to be consistently good at it. We're still a long way from finding a modern movie director as talented with the form as Vincente Minnelli, Bob Fosse, Stanley Donen, or Busby Berkeley, ... and it's like Hollywood isn't even trying to find him or her.
Reader Comments (43)
This looks hilariously awful.
I like any news/article that brings up Six Degrees of Separation
And Hooper continues to prove that Best Director win over Fincher was a farce.
I'm looking forward to this. Jennifer Hudson could use a professional win.
I. CAN'T. WAIT. FOR. THIS. FUCKING. MESS!
I'm......conflicted. I love the show itself, and love 3 out of the 4 announced cast. But, and it's a big one, this is a dance-heavy show. Taylor Swift, bless her, has no rhythm.
I'm just astounded at what a hot mess this all sounds. But hey look... I'd rather have more sucky musical films out there if it means more musicals in general.
Then again I never got CATS. I saw it for the first time only last year and my roomie and I looked at each other afterwards and went... "WHAT? HOW? HUH?"
Taylor Swift? That overrated, no-talent succubus cunt?
If they'd persuaded Stockard Channing to play Grizabella then I'd be at the front of the queue, even excited.
As it is, I'll only be going out of morbid curiousity.
Rather have Mamma Mia 3.
Oh gawd Jennifer Hudson can't even act to save her life. She won the Oscar strictly due to that showstopper. Take away all the music and what's left is a wooden stiff performance.
Yeah this is bad. Hooper is not a fun director, swift has proven her limitations on film, as has Hudson who is too young for the role. Audra is right there!
Taylor Swift? Please, NO.
@Pete. "Oh gawd Jennifer Hudson can't even act to save her life. "// Check out "Chi-Raq". She was fantastic there.
As for the "Cats" movie, I can't imagine it working as is. There's already a filmed version of the show which I've seen which was perfectly good for any fan of the show to relive it. It has to be different. My pitch would've been to construct a narrative around it. Like making Grizabella someone's cat, like an old lady or a child and Grizabella (or her owner) is sick or dying. They're going to the Jellicle Ball to get an extra life or go to heaven or something. That could work.
But what would they do about the cats? Will it be CGI/mo-cap cats? Then you'll have to rethink the choreography to make it more appropriate for a cat body. Will it be like the show with the makeup and cat suits? Then it has the potentially to look silly in the movie. I can only assume Tom Hooper knows what he's doing and I'm curious to see where they go with this.
I am okay with JHud and McKellen. But Swift and Corden? Bitch please it's already a gamble enough to make this film
I too would like today's Donen/Minnelli/Fosse/Berkeley to step forward. The only one I can think of in the past thirty years who has come close is Trey Parker. Is he interested in directing another movie musical?
Expecting the news of James Corden leaving the cast. The guy sucks.
Jemes Corden is all the reason you need to avoid this.
Wow, a MUST-SKIP.
Will it be all cgi?
Irvin, yes I've seen that. Still as wooden especially her line reading!
I just saw that Disney is going ahead with a live-action Lady and the Tramp film.
I wish that they would stop re-imaging every film in their canon and just find new material!
catbaskets, Betty Buckley was in her mid-thirties when she won the Tony for the role; Hudson will be 37 in September.
On paper this, of course, sounds absolutely dreadful with the potential to be equally horrid in execution. How and ever, as someone who has been rooting for J. Hud since American Idol, I really need this to work in her favor. I don't care if the rest of the movie is the biggest POS to hit celluloid. I need her to be brilliant.
As for Hooper, oy vey. A film adaptation of a musical like this needs a visionary with the type of talent that can help mitigate its inherent hokiness. He ain't it.
BTW, I think I read a rumor that Taylor Swift might be playing a new character and that ALW is writing a new song for her.
Cats was the first show I ever saw on Broadway, so I have a soft spot for it. I'm just kind of perplexed as to how they're going to film it-- are the cats going to be cgi or will the actors wear cat costumes or... it just seems like a strange choice for a film. And there's already a filmed stage production.
For some reason I would rather see Ian McKellen as Gus the theatre cat instead of Old Deuteronomy.
Live action cats singing in a wife angle lens? Bring on the garbage fire
The world is already ready to hate it even more than Les Misérables.
With Hopper directing, will we even see the cat costumes or just closeups of Taylor Swift?
Usually I'm always excited to read about the cast of new movies but this one is so unappealing.
I'm going to be obsessed with that Judi Dench pic for years to come.
I wish the animated version of Cats that Amblimation had been developing came to pass instead. The concept art for it looked gorgeous. An animated film is really the one way I could see an adaptation of a show like this working.
"... it would take real creative chutzpah and genius imagination to adapt it sufficiently to cinema to make it work at all."
...which are qualities that simply scream "GET ME TOM HOOPER!"
I can't with this. I LOVE Cats. I don't particularly need it to become a movie, but I'd be interested to see what they do with it. But then every single decision they've made so far has been so utterly wrong that I can only imagine I'll see it out of pure morbid curiosity of just how terrible it could possibly be. Like, could we possibly end up with a The Producers/Springtime For Hitler-style situation where because literally every single thing is wrong, it ends up being a camp classic?!?
JHud is COMPLETELY wrong for Grizabella. McKellen would be a better Gus than Old Deuteronomy (who has almost nothing to do in the musical). Corden... whatever. And Swift? I can't imagine what role she would be playing, so they must be creating a role just for her, and the show really doesn't need any additions.
WHY?!? Just... WHY?!?!?!?!?!?
Grizabella should have been Michelle Pfeiffer. She's done musicals, she was already Catwoman, and Hollywood doesn't utilize her enough. It's a perfect meta-narrative.
Eh, at least they didn't cast Meryl Streep (who I love). I'm happy that they're ramping up the singing talent with J.Hud rather than worrying about "acting." I mean, does Cats even have a script? Or need acting?
How on earth is this going to work? I can't even stand the music, and we're the target audience for this and can barely stand the idea.
Just about any other hit (or even flop) Broadway show of the last 40 years would be a better bet.
Ingmar Bergman (among many others) has said that the closest art form to cinema is music. It stands to reason that the best directors of film musicals would be the most cinematic filmmakers. It's sad that Spike Lee, Danny Boyle, Brian DePalma, and others in that vein, haven't done a true film musical. Who are the next group of people in that vein? Maybe they can't read music off of a sheet of paper, maybe they don't have choreography experience, but you'd team them with choreographers and musical directors. As much as I'm not really looking forward to a remake of WEST SIDE STORY, at least the idea of Spielberg doing a musical is exciting. He'll know what to do with the camera, he can edit the hell out of a sequence, he knows how to handle complex mise-en-scene.
Dan H: It's hilarious that you mentioned DePalma, because does EVERYONE forget Phantom of the Paradise? And that kind of gets to why hyper cinematic directors typically don't want to do "normal" musicals. I'd guess a Coheed and Cambria adaptation (musical or not) gets that level of director before, say, Wicked gets that level of director.
Taylor Swift cant Sing.
One thing in this thread I'm really glad to see is that there are plenty of other folks out there who don't like James Corden. He comes off as almost entirely sycophantic and needy.
A Cats movie, ha ha, whoa.
Remember the film versions of RENT and A CHORUS LINE? How did those turn out?
The only way this might work would be as an animated movie- live action actors pretending to be singing dancing cats does have camp potential- it might end as one of those what- the- hell- were- they- thinking- movies
Judi Dench was indeed cast in Cats but she tore her achilles tendon. and was replaced by Elaine Paige.
This makes me think that we'll have from here to twenty four years finally the filming of Wicked.
I don't know if I consider "Phantom of Paradise" a musical in the "Cats," "Singin' in the Rain," "Chicago," "Sound of Music" sense, Volvagia. (And I did think about mentioning it, but my post was long enough already.)
The only way I can see this working as a movie is to do it motion-capture animation. Since it would be ridiculous to have motion-capture cats dancing like Solid Gold Dancers, you could cut all the dance music and shorten the film's running time by almost 25 minutes. Just amp up the production values to state-of-the-art visual effects and concentrate on the character songs - I'd actually be excited to see THAT movie. A movie with actors dressed up in cat costumes and make-up - um, NOT SO MUCH.