Why did the Cats movie fail so badly at the box office?

Cats’ dismal box office performance – it’s headed for a hundred million dollar loss – is just further evidence that the folks that made it never understood why the original was so popular in the first place.

Cats is a bad movie. Like, really, really bad.

So bad that its parent studio has surreptitiously removed it from its “For Your Consideration” awards page, and is basically acting like they’ve never heard of the film. So bad that it’s set to lose $100 million dollars at the box office, according to Variety. 

A hundred million dollars! In real American money! Whew.

What the heck happened here?

Well, let’s just get it out there: The biggest reason Cats is bombing is that the movie is straight up bad. It’s currently sitting at a 20% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes and has spawned a slate of absolutely hilarious bad reviews, in which journalists use every cat pun imaginable to describe the film as an affront to humanity in general.

(My fave is still the Boston Globe take that simply says “Oh, God, my eyes” at one point.)

The word of mouth on this movie is atrocious. No one’s even describing Cats as the fun kind of bad.

The thing is, this movie always had a kind of elevated sense of itself. The Andrew Lloyd Webber musical it’s based on is positively beloved, and broke records in the West End and on Broadway. Maybe today’s theater kids love things like Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen, but there’s a ton of nostalgia around this show.

But rather than take advantage of that built-in audience – which would have legit been happy with a simple recreation of the theatrical costumes from the stage show, just saying – the brain trust behind Cats appears to have wanted to make a “prestige” version of the musical.

And to do so they spared no expense, stocking the Cats cast with stars such as Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, James Corden, Rebel Wilson and noted cat enthusiast Taylor Swift. They developed “digital fur technology” to turn this stable of award-winning performers human-shaped fur babies. And they gave the film to Oscar-winning director Tom Hooper, who made The King’s Speech and recently – even largely successfully! – adapted the musical Les Miserables for the big screen. (We just won’t talk about the horrible decision to cast Russell Crowe as Javert. It’s the “digital fur” of singing.)

The thing is, though, there’s not an easy way to really make the story of Cats prestige. The tale of a group of cats with increasingly bizarre names competing with one another to tell the most moving life story so that Judi Dench’s Old Deuteronomy will pick one of them to ascend to the “Heaviside Layer” (a.k.a. cat heaven, sort of?) is just too weird to take entirely seriously.

And no matter how much glittery catnip Switft’s Bombalurina dumps on us, if the film itself doesn’t recognize that this story is pure camp, well. There’s no hope for it.

This isn’t The Wire, guys. No one asked for you to take Cats seriously or try to make it a gritty drama.

I mean, one of the cats has psychic powers. 

At the end of the day, Hooper and friends seemed to have no idea what drew so many audiences to the stage version of Cats, which means they made a movie that didn’t appear to appeal to anybody – not the fans of stage version, or family audiences out at the multiplex for the holidays, or even musical theater nerds in general. This story isn’t gritty enough to play it straight, and the film refuses to have anything that might be called fun.

Who is this Cats for? Nobody. Which is why no one is turning up to watch it.

Have you seen Cats? What did you think of it? Let us know in the comments.