'Cats' Director Rushes Visual Effects Update Into Theaters After Disastrous Opening

Though its poster promises "the most joyful event of the holiday season," the new movie Cats scored just 18% with professional critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and the $100 million adaptaton of the Broadway musical has so far earned just $6.5 million at the box office.

Its director apparently doesn't want that to be the last word. "You've seen movies receive visual touch-ups in special edition re-releases, but Universal is trying something new: it's updating a movie while it's still in the middle of its initial theatrical run," writes Engadget, on a move that the Hollywood Reporter calls "unheard of for a finished title already in release, according to cinema operators and Hollywood studio executives."

Insiders talking to the publication said that director Tom Hooper wanted to alter some of the effects after rushing to get the movie ready in time for its December 16th premiere screening. Reportedly, the updated movie is available for theaters to download today (December 22nd) from a satellite server, while those theaters that can't download it will get a hard drive by December 24th...

The tweaks aren't likely to change the general outlook on the movie, which has been...less than favorable. Many viewers are still likely to experience the uncanny valley as they watch anthropomorphized felines dance on screen.

The Daily Beast even argues the film marks the day that Hollywood musicals became "about the perversion of the human body through technology":

Nothing can prepare you for the faces. You can read a hundred pieces about Cats, director Tom Hooper's adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's beloved-ish musical about cats having a singing competition, and nothing, nothing you read about it could prepare you for the pure, unnerving spectacle of seeing a computer trying to affix human faces to a fucked up, motion-capture cat with human body parts, a tail, and a big human nose, sitting right there in the middle of a cat's head, sitting on human shoulders, doing dancing routines in a world scaled to cat size...

[T]he second anyone starts moving their body, the effect goes haywire. The face always seems a step or two behind the moving body -- a human visage temporarily displaced from the twisted cat demon. Especially in a movie theater, watching on a high-definition projector, your attention affixed to the horror show going on in front of you, you can't help but notice... It's honestly a miracle a movie this twisted got made, in a world where every movie that costs more than $50 million is engineered for maximum inoffensiveness...

[T]he attempt to bridge the gap between cat and man, to make human beings into dancing cats using computers, just transforms the whole thing into a freakish nightmare...

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