Millions of computers across North America last weekend.
Wow, look at all these trailers that dropped from Comic Con. New Watchmen and His Dark Materials. Westword season 3. The Witcher looks pretty cool. Marvel Phase 4! Nice! What’s this . . . Cats? I totally forgot they were making that a movie! Let’s click on it and see . . .
Wait, what . . .
Oh my God. OH. MY. GOD!!!! That’s not right . . . Jesus this is creepier than the new IT trailer. Stop stop stop STOP! Good Lord it’s over . . . what the hell did I just watch . . . my soul feels dirty. I think I need to scrub my eyeballs with bleach. Or maybe acid.
It’s been over a week since the trailer for next December’s Cats was unleashed on an unsuspecting world and parts of the Internet are still throwing up. It was creepy, unsettling and made almost everyone who saw it want to take a hot shower or three. Some people still aren’t sleeping.
Between the cringe-worthy make up and prosthetics, the nightmarish CGI (there was CGI, right?) and the often jerky-marionettes-having-seizures like dancing, the trailer looked like a refugee straight from Lucifer’s worst acid trip. James Corden’s character looked like The Cat in the Hat after he ate a dozen other Cats in the Hats and washed them down with a gallon of meth. Taylor Swift looked like she was trying to be sexy but her slinking and shimmying was cringe-scary. And the whole thing looked like it took place in the darker parts of Stephen King’s subconscious.
It worked perfectly.
A lot of people were turned off by the trailer (just hours after it dropped it had well over forty thousand Downvotes on YouTube as opposed to fourteen thousand Approvals) and the commentary on social media revealed that it freaked out the entire planet more than Three Mile Island and Chernobyl combined. The backlash would seem to paint it as a complete and utter failure.
But I’m here to tell you its the exact opposite.
The truth is it was a smashing success. Look at it like this, during a weekend where HBO and Netflix were stealing all the oxygen from the room before Marvel conquered the world (again), Cats managed to trend on the most popular (and therefore important) social media when it seemed like the entire world only wanted to take about Mickey Mouse and the Witcher. Not even Donald Trump could broach that exclusive list that fateful Sunday; yes Cats did what even the master Troll of Twitter couldn’t and held its own against Watchmen and the MCU’s Phase Four.
The vast majority of people who gave it a thumbs down on social media were never going to see it anyway. The trailer’s negative backlash confirmed their pre-existing bias that the movie was going to suck and they were right to give it a wide berth. This trailer wasn’t meant for those people.
This might be the part where you think “Yeah, but nobody liked the trailer. It was creepy.” And you’d be half right. It WAS creepy. Creepy as F. But you know what another word for creepy is? Memorable.
For instance; I have a co-worker who hadn’t seen the trailer so I posted it on her Facebook page, expecting her reaction to mirror my own and justify the jokes I was making at its expense during lunch. And while she did agree with me that it was creepier than OJ Simpson’s Twitter account (seriously Twitter, WTF?), she also kind of liked it and is considering seeing it when it hits the multiplex this Christmas.
And that my friends, is who the trailer was meant for.
For some reason Universal is pitting Cats against Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (both films are scheduled to premier December 20th), and while you may be thinking that the Star Wars franchise is vulnerable following the divisive The Last Jedi and the box office failure of Solo, the gang from a galaxy far far away won’t be the only competition Cats will be facing this Christmas. It’s coming out a mere week after Jumanji: The Next Level and just a few days before the latest Little Women remake. So it’s going to be in tough, no matter how you look at it.
Nor is this to say that Cats doesn’t have anything going for it. It’s history (one of the longest running musicals in history), music (the soundtrack will likely find its way into a few million stockings) and star power (Judi Dench, Idris Elba, Jennifer Hudson, Ian McKellen, James Corden, Taylor Swift and Rebel Wilson among others) are enough to probably put more than a few butts in theatre seats. And while the competition is fierce, releasing it right at Christmas doesn’t hurt (though that first weekend of December is looking awfully empty and free of competition right now).
Having said all that, every movie needs an advantage or two let alone those messing with Star Wars and Dwayne Johnson. And that’s where Cats’ trailer comes in. You can bet that there were a lot of people like my co-worker, potential ticket buyers completely unaware of the movie’s existence consumed by a mysterious, almost creepy magnetism (let’s be honest, creepy is literally the only word to describe it). How many dollars will that morbid curiosity translate into? Time will tell.
Universal still has another five months to promote Cats and convince movie-goers it’s a solid alternative to all the other blockbuster fare this holiday season. And in the end, it will be its quality as a film that makes or breaks it (no matter how many people are convinced to give it a chance on opening weekend, bad reviews and negative word of mouth will kill it faster than a silver bullet to the heart). So the trailer’s weird appeal could be moot if said voyeurs tell everyone afterwards that it sucked.
But so far Cats has people talking, with some of those people strongly considering forking over some dough to see it instead of ignoring it. That’s a decent first step for a movie choosing to go up against some pretty stiff competition.
And right now, it’s all a result of that insomnia inducing trailer.
Image Universal Pictures
