With Cats horrifying audiences around the world, including possibly you, let's all step into a hot-air balloon and travel to the heavenly lands of speculation. You see, a screen adaptation of the silliest mega-musical in Andrew Lloyd Weber's repertoire (give or take Love Never Dies or Starlight Express) was already a dicey proposition, but it needn't be so doomed. But add to that the deranged incompetence of Tom Hooper and digital fur technology,and we have something for the pantheon of all-time bad movies.
What could have been done to avoid catastrophe? Many psychologically scarred movie-goers may be asking this question from the depths of the madness that now consumes them: Could this have been any different? Could it have been better? Could it have been good, even? Maybe…
Here are three ways to fix Cats that don't include visual effects patches.
Turn it into an animated feature
This one seems quite obvious. There's no way in hell, people acting as cats will ever be anything but laugh-inducing. In the theatre, it arguably works but that's due to the specificities of that art form. Distance, both physical and aesthetic, is one of them. You can't have that on a big-screen adaptation, for there are close-ups and the sheer size of the screen to consider. The best way to fix all of this is to make it animated. Do it in the style of Cats Don't Dance or Zootopia. Those filmmakers at least managed to create anthropomorphized felines that aren't horrifying to behold.
Embrace the artifice
If you're dead-set on making it a live-action adaptation, one way to go about it is to fully embrace the artifice of the premise and setting. In the actual film, there's a lot of visual references to early cinema, including a poster for 1927's The Cat and the Canary. Wouldn't it have been fun to make a pastiche of Old Hollywood musical productions with anti-naturalistic studio sets and glamourous cat-people? Fuse the magical fakeness of Busby Berkeley with modern sensibilities, a punch of earnest feeling and all the razzle-dazzle that doesn't involve interspecies hybrids with smooth crotches. In other words, give this to Baz Luhrmann instead of Tom Hooper. Alternatively, travel in time and have Ken Russell direct the horniest permutation of Cats the human mind can conceive.
Make it more "theatrical"
Maybe the best way to bring Cats to the big screen is to avoid the excision of theatrical elements. Instead of making it cinematic, make it even more stage-bound, with Brechtian mechanisms and elaborate illusions. There's no need to go to the extremes of Dogville but Joe Wright's Anna Karenina could be a good model to follow. Add a bit of Gaspar Noé's Climax and you're set for success. Such a thing might be worth seeing for its spectacle rather than for its wrong-headed grotesquerie.
Or, you know, don't make a movie out of Cats. Didn't Six Degrees of Separation teach us anything about the absurdity of that folly?