No motion picture has ever been recalled from theaters for public safety concerns, but what’s happened this weekend with Cats comes close.
The Tom Hooper-helmed adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that has us all salting conversations with the word “Jellicle” (“I’ll be there in five Jellicle minutes, can’t you give it a rest???!”) has inspired a lot of questions. One of them, however, has been answered: no, apparently it isn’t supposed to look that way.
Hooper stated at the world premiere at Lincoln Center in New York that he’d only put the finishing touches on the film and its “digital fur technology” 36 hours earlier. But with our current modern distribution methods, the opening weekend finish line is apparently just a suggestion to put your pencils down.
Universal has issued a downloadable “patch” that exhibitors have access to starting Sunday. For those who are unable to retrieve the new material in this manner (if they are still using CompuServe or something) hard drives will arrive by Tuesday. The studio is asking that all theaters make the replacement.
It is unclear what changes lurk in the new version. Were we supposed to see human hands on some of the cats? Probably not, and that feels like an easy fix. Were we supposed to understand where Jennifer Hudson was zooming off to in a hot air balloon at the end? Yes, and no amount CGI is going help you intuit the ontological significance of the Heaviside Layer if you can't figure it out for yourself. Will Hooper’s changes explain why there is there a milk bar in London’s West End, as if this isn’t a human world, but a cat world like the world of Cars is a car world? Ohmygod, will the new changes include a Cats/Cars crossover? Are Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer going to hang out with Lightning McQueen and ‘Mater?!??! There’s only one letter difference in these titles, after all.
Changes in a film after release are rare but not uncommon. None other than Stanley Kubrick made trims after the first weekend on The Shining. Recently the kiddie flick Show Dogs cut a joke that involved testicle-squeezing. In 1993 a college football film The Program starring James Caan featured a hazing sequence in which jocks would lie down in the middle of a busy highway. After a kid died while imitating this moment, the studio (Disney) yanked the sequence from the movie. (This being a pre-digital age, this was a much more costly replacement.) The 2000 film Wonder Boys had a line removed from a dark scene in which Tobey Maguire runs down a list of Hollywood suicides for Katie Holmes, Robert Downey Jr. and Michael Douglas. Producer Alan Ladd Jr. petitioned Paramount to take his father (Alan Ladd’s) name out of Tobey’s mouth for the home video releases.
The Cats changes, whatever they may be, still feel a bit for naught, as the movie has already landed like a clump of wet kitty litter, earning just $6.5 million at the box office. It was projected to hit an already dismal $15 million.
Moreover, whatever surface changes are made to the movie, the movie is still going to be Cats. Still, some audiences still seem to be getting it no matter what.
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December 23, 2019 at 01:21AM
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