#ReleaseTheButtholeCut helps noted box office flop Cats find new life in a time of crisis

New viewers are seeing Cats for the first time, and they’re picking up on one little thing that’s missing.

It’s fair to say that Cats, Tom Hooper’s film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s mystifying musical released in December, was a flop. Let us briefly recount the ways:

• Critically, Cats earned a 20 percent rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes; an unfavorable 32 on Metacritic; and a C+ Cinemascore, indicating poor audience response.
• The movie made $74 million at the box office, meaning it didn’t even make back its reported $100 million production budget.
• Tom Hooper continued to tweak Cats’ lackluster visual effects even post-release. The changes didn’t leave much of an impression.
• Universal Pictures chose not to submit the movie for Oscar consideration.
• Instead, co-stars James Corden and Rebel Wilson mocked the film in-costume and onstage at the Academy Awards ceremony in February.
• Cats did receive several honors, however — from the Razzie Awards, which named it Worst Picture of the Year among other accolades.

All of this to say, Cats: It’s not great! Yet the film’s notoriously bizarre storyline (in which anthropomorphized cats compete via song and dance to ascend to Cat Heaven), uncanny valley-skirting human-cat hybrids, and choppy CGI have cultivated a fanbase. Movie theaters continued holding “rowdy” screenings of the movie for weeks after its release, encouraging moviegoers to sing and shout along with the so-called Jellicle Cats as they danced their way to the land of eternal catnip in the sky. In 2020, Cats has become something of a collective shorthand for “so bad it’s … maybe good?” — particularly for those who can tolerate its nonsensical plot while Idris Elba-Cat and James Corden-Cat snarl and fart onscreen for 90 minutes.

And now that Cats is available for digital purchase and rental, new viewers are discovering the ironic glee that this weirdo film can provide — including some with enough social media influence to generate entire Cats-based hashtags.

Cats is continuing to confuse viewers, three months after release

One newcomer to Cats is actor Seth Rogen, who live-tweeted his experience watching it while “very stoned” on Twitter late Tuesday night. (Cats plus weed would seem to result in an extra-wacky viewing.) Rogen started his journey as a skeptic: “Am I supposed to know what a Jellicle is?” he asked, in the first tweet of a lengthy thread. “They’ve said it 200,000 times but I don’t know what’s happening haha.”

It’s a totally fair response to a movie based on a musical based on a collection of freewheeling T.S. Eliot poems. Rogen also called out the visual and narrative inconsistencies, from the presence of a “milk bar” (“For cats? Is this in Clockwork Orange world? Huh?”) to Judi Dench’s coat made of cat fur (“which I can only assume is socially APPALLING in this world”).

By the end, Rogen was … well, he actually didn’t make it to the end of the movie. Based on the timestamps in his Twitter thread, he gave up less than an hour into Cats. “Alright I’m turning this off and watching 90 day fiancé. Good night. Stay clean as fuck,” he said as he signed off.

Rogen’s thread was a pretty honest characterization of what it’s like to watch Cats, especially for people who aren’t familiar with the source musical. The movie can be a lot to take in, what with humanoid cats with names like Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer singing and gyrating all over the place.

But fellow Twitter users lapped up Rogen’s tweets, inspiring a deluge of Cats conversation.

Enter #ReleaseTheButtholeCut, which riled up Cats fans and nonfans alike in a single tweet

Amid all the errant observations, “WTF?” questions, and memes, one tweet suddenly ricocheted the renewed Cats conversation in a different direction. Along with the replies and reminiscences came a tweet from someone who claimed to know someone who worked on Cats’ visual effects team.

The cats in Cats have numerous human features — fingered hands, toed feet, flaring nostrils — but one thing they do not have is clothing (save for Judi Dench’s cat-fur coat). The exposed rear ends of the cats are family-friendly, however; they have tails, but no butt cheeks. There’s nary a genital in sight, and only the silhouettes of features that serve to demarcate female from male felines. (Taylor Swift’s Bombalurina was called out for having human-like “cat boobs.”)

So the suggestion of a so-called butthole cut ignited a Cats-lusting crowd of tweeters eager for more ways to eke entertainment out of the movie. Rogen jumped on the train, urging Universal to #ReleaseTheButtholeCut.

Rian Johnson, director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Knives Out, joined in. So did Lindsay Ellis, a YouTuber who specializes in film critique. With the power of the Twitter blue checkmark, these folks and others were able to get #ReleaseTheButtholeCut trending.

It’s a not-so-subtle reference to the long-established and thoroughly sincere cry from DC Comics fans, who regularly demand that Warner Bros. #ReleaseTheSnyderCut of Justice League. That movie was similarly flawed — albeit not to the same extent as Cats, at least according to critics. But in contrast to Cats, which was expected to be a mess from the moment its first misbegotten trailer was released, Justice League arrived with lofty expectations and a major fanbase behind it. So the frustration with its quality — and the cast and director Zack Snyder’s regular insistence that much of the movie’s better content was cut — continues on in earnest.

Just as the Snyder Cut may remain apocryphal forever, so too may the rumored Butthole Cut of Cats. One wrinkle: Ben Mekler, whose tweet spurred the original butthole conversation, received a note from a “CATS VFX crewmember who has asked to remain anonymous,” who claimed that no Butthole Cut exists.

So there could be a much more … risqué version out there, perhaps, that could send Cats viewers starved for entertainment on a different wild goose chase.

And yet: Many years from now, will we even still want it? Will we shift onto the next campy travesty, whenever that arrives? It’s impossible to say. But as movie fans watch Hollywood shift its release schedules indefinitely and halt production on anticipated projects in the midst of a global pandemic, savoring Cats has become something of a salve.