About a year after we learned that a bunch of extremely famous people would be starring in a movie adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats for some inexplicable reason, we’ve finally got our first look at the thing. Universal just dropped a behind-the-scenes featurette for the movie-musical no one asked for, and it is… extremely intense?
Over background music that sounds like the score to a PBS documentary about opioid addiction, we’re introduced to the film’s absurdly stacked lineup of stars: Idris Elba, Rebel Wilson, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Jennifer Hudson, James Corden, Jason Derulo, and noted cat fanatic Taylor Swift. Disappointingly, we don’t actually get to see anyone in their cat getups—a complete and utter ripoff—but we do get to see Swift do this strange kind of meow-and-scratch type dance, which is interesting.
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We also hear from director Tom Hooper on exactly how he transformed his cast into cat-human hybrids, something he achieved through what he calls “digital fur technology,” resulting in “the most perfect covering of fur” you could possibly imagine on a human being.
Everything about this teaser is just as intense as that description. None of the actors laugh when they’re talking about the project; few smile. Everyone is very, very serious about crawling around on the floor with digital tails strapped to their asses and singing about Mr. Mistoffelees or whatever.
“The scale of this film is huge,” Idris Elba says at one point. “Three or four times bigger, for the cat perspective.”
“These are people, but they’re cats, and this is kind of blowing my mind,” James Corden says later. “There is nothing else like it.”
If the teaser tells us anything, it’s that everyone involved in Cats is not screwing around, not one bit—and whatever the hell this thing is, it’s about 10,000 times more hardcore than anyone could’ve imagined. Give the trailer a watch above, and marvel at the actors’ ability to discuss something as inherently goofy as a Cats movie with the same grave, morose severity you might use to talk about a death in the family. Oh, and make sure to catch Cats when it premieres on December 20—should be a blast!
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