A few weeks after it was released, Cats is projected to be one of the biggest box office disasters of all time. What happened?
The biggest problem was the CGI. This was a huge mistake for several reasons. A significant amount of the brain is devoted to recognizing faces and interpreting expressions. When the face doesn't register properly it triggers signals that something is wrong. The closer you get to human features without getting them perfect the more it seems wrong. This is known as the Uncanny Valley and it's not a good place to set a movie. Cats removed the actors' ears and replaced them with animated cat ears on top of the head. That just screams wrong.
The stage production used makeup to achieve the cat look. Granted the costumes looked dated by the end of the 1980s, but the concept worked because you knew there was a human head under the makeup.
CGI isn't cheap, either. Probably a good bit of the movie's $95 million budget went for CGI.
But even if they had used actors in makeup instead of CGI, the movie would have been difficult to watch because of the next problem - it looks terrible. Go back and look at successful musicals, especially ones with a lot of dancing. They have long cuts and wide camera angles. Cats is very, very choppy with cuts every 2-4 seconds, often changing from a close-up on someone's feet to a head shot or something else jarringly different. The camera angles are also weird, looking up at the dancers. Possibly this was done to show the sets towering over them and give a sense of scale but it's backwards from how that usually works.
Regardless, fast cuts may be good for music videos but they are the wrong way to do a lavish musical with complicated dance numbers.Combine the quick cuts, the camera angles and the rest and you have a visual mess.
Then there's the stars. Casting a bunch of big-name stars only to cover them in make-up and CGI is self-defeating. I doubt that the star appeal added enough to the box office to pay the extra salaries.
And speaking of stars, there's Taylor Swift. The stage production is really a bunch of poems set to music and strung together with only the slightest suggestion of a plot. The movie tries to make the plot stronger by having Taylor Swift acting as a witness to the gathering of the cats. This was a mistake. She's almost unrecognizable and she's intrusive. The movie constantly cuts to her wide-eyed face. She's supposed to be a surrogate for the audience but she ends up being a distraction. The movie can't just show us the different cats, it also has to show us how she reacts to them. That makes the choppy editing even more distracting. In the stage production whichever cat is being presented takes center stage and the cat chorus simply becomes supporting players. As a narrative device, inserting Taylor Swift is a total failure.
