Cats - The Movie

The reason we know movies lie about budget is because they have to submit proper accounts when applying for tax credits from the U.K. government, and some other governments with tax credit schemes. Interesting article about it here:
stephenfollows.com/do-filmmakers-lie-about-their-budgets/

Everyone will still go with the declared budget from the studio, though - it takes quite some time for those accounts to come to light. Plus the movie press industry is about entertainment, not investigative journalism, and ‘Hollywood accounting’ being nonsense is an open enough secret - everyone knows that the studios aren’t honest about this stuff.

Louis Wain biopic from the writer/director of Ch4's excellent Flowers just about to start filming with Cumberbatch and Claire Foy so maybe anthropomorphised cats will be next years' unicorns-and-rainbows (please god).

I think the majority of criticism for the trailer comes from people who've never seen Cats

Watched it on you tube and wasn’t keen but then saw trailer on the big screen at odeon .... and it all seemed to make sense really liked it

Also saw it on the big screen screen and lots around me were saying they wanted to see it. Certainly didn't look as bad as I had expected from this thread. Dislaimer: it is by far my least favourite musical)

I don’t either

This has been my hunch from the get-go. 
The fact that there was this "negative reaction" is not going to deter anyone from going to see it - if anything, it raised people's attention to the fact that this is coming out. 
Most people aren't on theatre boards parsing and critiquing every aspect of every thing (like we like to do) so they might have not even known Cats was being made into a film - saw the preview with the cast and thought "oh that's interesting".  And the vast majority of people who went to see Cats on Broadway, on the West End or around the world for decades don't care that some theatre snobs think it's "the worst musical".  It's far from my favorite ALW musical - I don't remember the last time I even listened to the recording, but will most definitely be there when it opens.  And I'm betting, so will a lot of other people.  Will it topple Star Wars?  No.  Will it make back it's money and then some? I'm sure that it will

Back to the Growltiger discussion for a moment: I've just listened to the segment -- my favorite in the show. I'm afraid that the reason the Growltiger/Billy M'Caw segment may not be used much these days is that it's NOT PC (although it may be favored in certain circles): 


"But most to cats of foreign race his hatred had been vowed
To cats of foreign name and race, no quarter was allowed..."

and later in the segment:

"Then Genghis gave the signal to his fierce Mongolian hordes
Abandoning their sampans, the chinks they swarmed aboard..."

Just watched this, fascinating. Thanks for sharing that.

So it sounds like Taylor Swift was just wrong when she said no motion-capture was used.

Given the world is still formed up mostly  in nation states and there's currently a very high level of conflict between many of them, and specific groups attacking them, with some humdinger major wars on the verge of breaking out, the viewers would have  to be ridiculously naive and out of contact with reality, to imagine that conflict had vanished or was fought out otherwise.

The second quote is clearly a reference to Genghis Khan who indeed led a Mongol horde  , who were indeed fierce- unless modern history teaches they were peace loving misunderstood pony riders who just went roaming over all Asia .. 

The only objectionable word is chinks- and its easily replaced by Chinese, or if they want to be neutral and not offend a big market, you can replace it with a whole range of words from crew to invaders , or none .

Thanks. Just looked!
So pretty much identical to the stage show :-)