Even top-class talent occasionally make a turkey. Cats, a musical fantasy film based on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage show, with a glittering ensemble cast of James Corden, Judi Dench, Jason Derulo, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellen, Taylor Swift, Rebel Wilson with Steven Spielberg executive producing has hit excoriatingly bad reviews. “A purr-fectly dreadful hairball of woe”; “a jaw-dropping feline folly”;” poorly conceived and executed”; “a tail better left untold”; “improbable and entirely indescribable”; “destined to go down in glorious infamy”; “a cross between Glee and hell”; “a sinister, all-time disaster from which no one emerges unscathed (zero stars out of five)”; “a rare and star-spangled calamity.” Rotten Tomatoes gives it one out of five stars and 17% approval. Ouch.
Director Tom Hooper has had some successes in the past with The King’s Speech, Les Miserables, The Danish Girl but this is clearly going to go down as a blot on his record.
Principal Photography kicked off on 12 December 2018 with a Sagittarius Sun square Neptune Mars in Pisces – so lots of showbiz dazzle but Neptune has a nasty habit of fizzling out – and given Neptune also squares Jupiter it didn’t get off on the best of footings – high hopes lead to disappointment. Bad reviews don’t necessarily go with bad box office but with tr Neptune closing the conjunction with Mars over the next few weeks which usually indicates failure and Neptune continuing to square the Sun in 2020 it looks a touch flat.
Tom Hooper, 5 October 1972, London, is an innovative Sun, Uranus Mercury in Libra with a super-determined Mars Pluto also in Libra. Tr Neptune is trailing across two of his midpoints till late January dampening his morale; with an uncertain tr Neptune square his Saturn in Gemini from late April 2020 on into 2021 as well. Not his shining hour.
The cat-human hybrid design here is just plain creepy. Creepy, creepy, creepy. Furry upright bodies, flat groins? It’s a lot.
But I did think the critics would unanimously eat it up.
When I saw the trailer I thought, ‘What the Hell? This has got massive flop written all over it.’ Not even the big names or even Taylor could pull me in to watch this. I’m not much of a fan of musicals anyway. But it looks just utterly bloody awful. Saying that, many films that get critically slammed can still do well. Film critics are not the be all and end all of a films potential success.