We cannot wait to watch kitty cat Idris Elba crawl around the Cats movie's gigantic, human-cat-scale sets
Ah, Tom Hooper’s upcoming Cats movie: It’s the CGI fur spectacular that just keeps on giving. We already sort of knew that Hooper’s adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s unkillable feline musical was going to be a weird one, just on the basis of its cast alone. (Taylor Swift! Jennifer Hudson! James Corden! Idris Elba! Singing together, all of them, while pretending to be cats!) Now we’ve got some concrete details, courtesy of a press event Universal did at CinemaCon this week, and it’s not sounding any more normal yet.
The studio refused to show off any footage from the actual film—thus briefly staving off the internet’s collective horniness apotheosis when Kitty Cat Idris finally leaks—but they did reveal some delightful details, including the fact that the movie’s sets have been constructed at “three to four times larger than normal human scale,” according to Vanity Fair. Which means we’re not just going to get to watch Taylor Swift cleaning herself while busting out “The Gumbie Cat”; we’ll get to watch it while she’s crawling around a dining room table straight out of Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.
This is, obviously, amazing, to the point that one could almost overlook the bit where Judi Dench—sorry, Dame Judi Dench—noted that “We spent a very very long time preparing how to be a cat,” while Elba reportedly emphasized his focus on capturing “the cat’s perspective.” To be fair, the studio did try to leaven all this madness by bringing Jennifer Hudson out to do a live rendition of “Memories,” but it’s still some absolutely bonkers stuff.