Is Cats The First Cult Classic Of The 2020s?

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the February 2020 issue of Meme Insider, a magazine covering memes and other internet phenomena. You can subscribe here.

It seems like only yesterday the first trailer for Tom Hooper’s adaptation of the wildly popular Andrew Lloyd Weber musical Cats dropped online, prompting a deluge of bewilderment and jokes. Why was the virtually plotless parade of singing and dancing cats being adapted? Why was Taylor Swift in it? And what the heck was up with Hooper’s so-called Digital Fur Technology, the now-infamous CGI technique employed to make the film’s star-studded cast look like the cat-hybrid abominations of a mad scientist?

It seemed too bizarre to be true. For months, it was as though the internet forgot about the film entirely, and the Cats craze fell into a lull. But one month prior to the film’s release, a second trailer graced the web, one even more bizarre than the first, featuring insane “cat”-based puns and Taylor Swift shaking her cat breasts. The December 20th release date was just around the corner, and the world could only brace itself for the imminent furball to be hocked from Hooper, Swift, and the rest of the cast.

Upon release, the film was not well-received. Cats was critically slaughtered by those who compared the film to “a sinister, all-time disaster from which no one emerges unscathed.” One critic called it “a mesmerizingly ugly fiasco that makes you feel like your brain is being eaten by a parasite.” It was unfinished; much was made about Judi Dench’s completely unedited, very-human hands which appeared in several scenes. Hooper took an unprecedented move and sent out a second, more polished version of the film to theaters after its initial release. The film earned a paltry $6.5 million domestic on its opening weekend, a huge failure against its massive budget. On a critical, technical, and commercial level, the film was widely seen as a flop. But if you’ve been following certain sectors of Twitter in the past two months, you wouldn’t know it.

Like the parasitic worm Leucochloridium, Cats has taken over the brains of its viewers and turned them into people who seem incapable of anything but basic human functions and thinking about Cats. The timeline remains flooded with Cats memes, lyrics from Cats songs, and takes from people begging to be freed from their Jellicle hell. Oh, also people understand what the word “Jellicle” means now. If you don’t believe me, do a quick Twitter search of the word Skimbleshanks and see how the Cats craze is not only still in full force, but has transcended from ironic goofery to genuine fandom. How did this happen?

To understand how Cats has shifted from a film everyone agreed was terrible to a potential cult classic, we need to understand how cult classics work. Cats has less in common with widely-beloved modern Broadway adaptations like Chicago and Sweeney Todd than it does with Rocky Horror Picture Show, the legendary Tim Curry-Susan Sarandon musical comedy which has become the gold standard of movie-musical cult classics. For decades, fans have attended interactive screenings of the film where they’re invited to dance, sing along and participate with the show. It’s not difficult to imagine a similar trajectory for Cats. The comic Kevin Porter posted footage of the theater audience with which he saw the film dancing along to “Mister Mistoffelees,” a pivotal number in the movie’s second act.

However, unlike Rocky Horror, Cats is not an intentional comedy. For all the film’s glitzy excess, it doesn’t quite reach the heights of “camp.” Though “camp” is an elusive concept, it’s generally understood to be a theatrical term for excessiveness with humorous intent; n short, going “over-the-top” for laughs. Cats plays it straight. The biggest laughs in Cats aren’t during James Corden’s awkwardly shoehorned jokes but during the film’s most sincere moments. Dame Judi Dench’s tottering entrance as “Old Deuteronomy” is far more amusing than Rebel Wilson’s monstrous turn as the more comedic Jennyanydots. In a sense, Cats is the musical companion to films like Showgirls and The Room, iconically awful and trashy movies that are enjoyed purely on a meta level. The film itself isn’t entertaining but watching it sure as hell is.

It helps that Cats has its fair share of maddeningly catchy songs. While the film is littered with duds, it’s undeniable that Weber managed to strike gold a few times. While even those with no knowledge of Cats will likely have heard the exceedingly overwrought “Memory” from Grizabella, “Cats” has several strong numbers, such as “Macavity,” “Skimbleshanks,” and “Mungo Jerry and Rumpleteaser.” For audience members, it's likely these earworms will far outlast nitpicks about the cinematography and technical flaws in the film.

Taking this all into account, Cats may have a chance earn a place in cinematic history among the pantheon of cult classics, to be watched with wine and popcorn among a talkative audience of friends. Perhaps that’s why the Broadway musical was as bafflingly successful as it was. For all the reviews comparing the musical to a surreal, biblical plague, the film is about as faithful an adaptation of Cats as one can hope for.

On a personal level, my overwhelming feeling walking out of the film was that it was much like the stage play, in all its nonsensical mediocrity, and the supposedly legendary awfulness of the film didn’t register upon first viewing. But I soon felt it, the bug that has lodged itself into many a viewer’s head over the past month. “Skimbleshanks, the Railway Cat” climbed up my Spotify most-played. I had arguments over which cat was most deserving to be the “Jellicle Choice” (the title all cats in the show are trying to gain, which allows them to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and gain a new life. Basically, they’re all singing and dancing for the chance to die). O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! I loved Cats.