The movie version of Cats was so bad that composer Andrew Lloyd Webber got a dog.
Speaking to CBS Sunday Morning, the musical maestro said that star-studded film version of Cats, his popular theatre show, was “appalling” for a list of reasons he did not have enough time to explain.
Webber, whose other musical hits include Jesus Christ Superstar, Phantom of the Opera and Evita, is widely seen as the most successful theatrical composer of all time, with dozens of Tony Awards and Grammy Awards to his name, as well as a peerage in the U.K., where he is a Lord. When it comes to the big screen adaptation of Cats, however, Webber is happy to distance himself from the project.
“After the appalling Cats movie, I went out and bought myself a little Havanese puppy,” Webber said, explaining that the pooch is now his “therapy dog on planes.”
“I just write a note to the airline saying, you know, ‘reason for dog on plane’ and I put: ‘Cats movie.’ And they always come back saying, ‘No doctor’s certificate required.'”
When asked for more detail on what about the Cats movie Webber found so offensive, the composer replied: “Well, is this a very, very long interview we’re doing? Because it could be a very, very long list.”
Released in 2019, the Cats movie featured an impressive cast that included Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellen, Taylor Swift, Rebel Wilson, James Corden and Judi Dench. But despite the caliber of acting talent involved — and Webber’s songs — the movie was widely panned for its truly odd CGI effects used to create its fake felines.
@cbssundaymorning Andrew Lloyd Webber does not hold back how he feels about the 2019 “Cats” movie, joking that it was so traumatic he bought himself a little dog to recover. Asked what he didn’t like about the film, the composer says it could be “a very, very long list.” #andrewlloydwebber #cats #catsthemovie #composer #broadway ♬ original sound – CBS Sunday Morning
Audiences were not sold by the digital fur added to Elba, Swift and co., and in an unprecedented move, Universal Pictures quickly released an updated version of the film that it urged theaters to begin showing as soon as possible — in a situation akin to a video game patch designed to adjust wonky graphics. To this day, rumors persist about a “butthole cut” of the movie that some audiences glimpsed where computer-generated feline anuses were still present on human actors.
Speaking previously, Webber has expressed a more human form of criticism for Cats: simply that the film adaptation was the product of a director uninterested in involving anyone from the original musical. “The problem with the film was that [director] Tom Hooper decided, as he had with [Les Misérables] that he didn’t want anybody involved in it who was involved in the original show,” Webber told The Sunday Times, via Entertainment Weekly. “The whole thing was ridiculous.”
IGN’s Cats review returned a 4.5/10 score, and noted that the film’s special effects rendered the movie “a lifeless disaster, though a few of its more charismatic cast members, namely Judi Dench and Idris Elba, manage to get a few licks in to add an alluring, ironic camp value.”
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
