Cats might have been a hit on Broadway in the 1980s and '90s, but the new film adaptation has been, by almost all standards, a catastrophic failure. Its $6.5 million domestic opening weekend wasn't even half of studio projections, disastrous for a major release with a production budget estimated at $100 million. You could point to The Greatest Showman as a pre-Christmas musical that opened small but had huge legs, but the difference is that audiences liked The Greatest Showman, which earned an A from CinemaScore polling, in contrast to Cats' C+ (anything below a B spells terrible word of mouth if you're not talking horror or intentionally controversial movies).
Cats is proving just as big a failure with the critics as it is at the box office, with an 18 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes, and some of the harshest review of any movie this year. Its awards season prospects are all but dead, unless producers are targeting the Razzies. Even the Golden Globes, which have notoriously low standards for musicals in the "Comedy/Musical" category, snubbed Cats, with the exception of the Taylor Swift-written song "Beautiful Ghosts." The Academy Awards shortlist for Best Original Song didn't even include "Beautiful Ghosts," although inexplicably the movie's not-even-finished-on-time special effects made the Best Visual Effects shortlist over the likes of Ad Astra, Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Pokemon: Detective Pikachu.
For all of its failures, though, Cats might have the potential for a rare sort of long-term success: It could very well be the next Rocky Horror Picture Show in terms of cult-classic longevity.
Although it's far too early for Cats to have developed the formal audience-participation traditions that define showings of Rocky Horror or The Room, screenings of Cats are becoming interesting experiences for the few who attend. Stories and even videos of some of the best and funniest audience-reaction moments have been going viral on Twitter ever since the movie opened.
In most situations, talking loudly during a movie, let alone getting up to dance or to pull out a phone to film something, is viewed as rude and inappropriate. Cats, however, is not most movies. If anyone going to see it was expecting something they could take seriously, they'd probably leave the theater in disgust by the time Rebel Wilson takes off her skin and eats a humanoid cockroach. Everyone seeing Cats is at some point going to laugh at it, and these sorts of audience participation moments make the film's unintentional humor into a truly wild experience.
The Alamo Drafthouse has already gotten ahead of the curve by scheduling "rowdy" screenings of Cats in which the theater chain, usually very strict about screening etiquette, allows audience members to let loose (within reason, of course). For a film that's doing so poorly at the box office otherwise, these screenings seem to be successful, and could be a model for keeping Cats playing in theaters long-term after it's finished its wide release.
Just as Dame Judi Dench (with human hands in the original print) ends Cats by solemnly declaring that "a cat is not a dog," so must this article end by clarifying that, despite the potential similarities in the experience, Cats is not Rocky Horror. Rocky Horror is actually a good movie. It's a campy one, a stupid one, not a great one, but it knows exactly what it is and succeeds perfectly at being what it's trying to be. Cats is both terrible and fascinating because it thinks it's genuinely serious Oscar bait, and it utterly fails at that. In that sense it's closer to The Room as far as cult movies go, but it's even weirder because it had genuine talent and $100 million behind it. Basically, Cats is its own indescribable thing, and it's no wonder a movie this weird is becoming such a delightful theatrical experience.
Directed by Tom Hooper, Cats stars James Corden, Judi Dench, Jason Derulo, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellen, Taylor Swift, Rebel Wilson and Francesca Hayward. The film is in theaters now.