Who asked for this? Which one of you out there asked for this? Who wanted a movie musical version of Cats? And who in the hell wanted it to be this creepy?

Look, I’ve seen the musical Cats one time, and that’s all it took for me to hate the absolute shit out of it. As a book of poetry, sure, it works. But as a stage musical, it doesn’t work at all. There’s no actual plot to the damn thing. A bunch of cats introduce themselves, and then one of them gets permission to die. That’s literally it. So, who decided that that would work on the big screen?

It is already hard to please both a film audience and theater audience when making a movie musical. But, I can’t imagine this nightmare fuel will please anybody.

Why did they even bother using CGI for the film? They’re not fooling anybody. We know that these are adults pretending to be cats. There’s no need to, first of all, make them that goddamn creepy looking and, second of all, digitally make them uncomfortably small. They could have done just what the stage musical does: build a set. Nobody is being fooled into thinking these are actual cats. So, why proceed in this way?

Now, they decided to CGI all the actors, fine. But why, I ask, have they decided to make the female cats busty? That just makes no goddamn sense to me at all. The actors are already not really themselves. And, if they’re going to CGI everybody to try and emulate actual cats, then get rid of the busts. It’s awkward and uncomfortable.

Let’s talk about the choreography for a moment. The marketing department is really trying to play up on the fact that the choreographer for Cats is Andy Blankenbuehler because he did the choreography for Hamilton on Broadway. Now, Blankenbuehler is a great choreographer. However, his style doesn’t seem to match the music of Cats for a second. With the brief look from the trailer, the dancing seems incredibly out of place. It would be like if we took the choreography from Hamilton or In The Heights and plopped it down into The Phantom of the Opera. It just wouldn’t work.

Finally, I need to talk about one of the worst things to happen to movie musicals, Mr. Tom Hooper. Now, Hooper has only directed one other movie musical, Les Miserables. And, that one movie musical was awful. The live singing was unnecessary and didn’t really add anything to the performances. Or, it didn’t add anything to the performances that we could tell, since emotional moments were shown in close-ups on faces and we didn’t get the full experience like we would if we could see the whole damn person. Hooper is a weird choice to make this film and, yet, he’s exactly who I would expect to make this film. And, just like Les Miserables, new music has been written for Cats, which is a clear and disgusting Oscar grab.

So, I’m going to ask again: which one of you asked for this? And can you please undo it?