Andrew Lloyd Weber's Cats was the first blockbuster musical and although critics were dismissive of its emphasis on spectacle over story, audiences lapped it up. The same cannot be said for the 2019 feature film adaptation.

The movie took the internet by storm and led to a treasure trove of tweets and memes, but dodgy CGI aside - what exactly went wrong here? How did something so reliably successful in one medium utterly crash and burn in another?

When dealing with source material that was so notoriously light on plot, it's understandable that the filmmakers would want to give this a slightly more traditional structure. Was expanding the role of the villainous Macavity the right move to achieve this? Let's get to work on our case file and find out.

Topics include, the book of poems that inspired the musical, the financial risk it took to stage the original production, the record breaking runs on Broadway and the West End, the animated adaptation that never came to fruition, Tom Hooper's unorthodox approach to Les Misérables and how well those same methods worked on Cats, Macavity's plan to take out the competition, the rushed post-production schedule, the visual effects nightmare, and much more!

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Peppers Theme by Kevin MacLeod
Link: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4998-peppers-theme
License: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

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Case File 031: Macavity (Cats)

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