For film critics, London press screening schedules are devised like a military operation: timetabled, negotiated and cross-referenced by an army of distributors and publicists, with a view generally to keeping each major studio offering out of the other’s way. The pre-Christmas crush is when the efficiency of the system tends to be most tested, but rarely has there been a scheduling overlap as high-profile and high-stakes as the one we saw on Monday night – as the large multimedia premieres of Cats and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker played back-to-back in Leicester Square, a long, loud double feature that sent bleary-eyed journalists home somewhere close to midnight.
It wasn’t always meant to be this way. The latest Star Wars episode had long had that premiere date nailed down: suitably close to its public release to appease studio spoilerphobia, and an acknowledgement that any franchise this critic-proof doesn’t need long-lead reviews. Cats gatecrashing this week’s schedule, however, was a frenzied move for a project that – despite years of gestation and development, not to mention a gargantuan budget – is looking increasingly like one of the most last-minute, down-to-the-wire blockbusters in Hollywood history.
Tom Hooper’s much hyped, fluorescent film version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber stage smash began shooting last December, wrapped at the beginning of April, and has been mired in allegedly complex post-production ever since. “Allegedly” seems an unnecessary qualifier, in fact, given what the trailer already revealed as early as July. Coating a vast ensemble of human stars and dancers in fluid, tactile feline pelts was never going to be a simple task: “digital fur technology”, as we’ve been instructed to call it, wasn’t built in a day. And it hasn’t just been the visuals consuming time: word has it that multiple Soho sound studios were booked out last week in a concentrated push to finish the film’s busy audio mix.
The delay has, it seems, come at some cost to the film’s awards season momentum. Most critics’ groups didn’t get to see the film in time for their voting deadlines, though even in the best of circumstances, their tastes tend to skew more highbrow. More imperative was meeting the cutoff for Golden Globes voting. A not-quite-finished cut was shown to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, known for supporting razzle-dazzle musicals such as The Greatest Showman and Burlesque, but with dispiriting results: the effort yielded only one nomination, for Taylor Swift’s original song Beautiful Ghosts. Even that seemingly surefire Oscars bid was shot down this week, as the Academy announced their shortlists for several categories: Swift’s mournful ballad was nowhere to be seen among the 15 best song finalists, though the visual effects are still in contention.
That those effects may be the film’s best remaining shot at awards glory is somewhat ironic, considering what a point of contention they’ve been. The images we saw back in the summer – to a global chorus of what-the-hell-is-that horror and delight that made an instant and inexhaustible meme factory out of a two-minute trailer – were, apparently, not quite finished.
The internet’s gleefully aghast reaction didn’t prompt the kind of studio panic, rethink and redesign that we recently saw with Sonic the Hedgehog, but Hooper claims that some tweaking was done in response: “The visual effects [in the trailer] were at quite an early stage,” he told Empire magazine. “Possibly there were, in the extremity in some of the responses, some clues in how to keep evolving. When you watch the finished film, you’ll see that some of the designs of the cats have moved on since then, and certainly our understanding of how to use the technology to make them work has gone up, too.”
If this is true, it may take eagle-eyed effects buffs to spot the exact evolution: a second trailer, released in November, didn’t look appreciably different from the first, though the shock impact of the human-cat hybrids’ appearance was reduced with forewarning. (Ready or not from a technical perspective, Universal was wise to tease the film’s look early and get us accustomed to its eccentricity.) And while the finished product is still under critical embargo for now, it’s not incriminating to say that it delivers very much the spectacle that those fixated on the trailer are expecting: the technicians’ many hours of painstaking work are nothing if not evident.
Hooper is known in the industry for being exacting, but if he’s been flustered by the film’s scramble to the finish line, he’s remained impassively cool in public – admitting casually on Monday’s New York premiere that he’d only locked the final cut at 8am the day before. He continues, moreover, to walk a fine line between deflecting the internet’s bewilderment and humouring it. In response to a Variety reporter asking whether he was happy with Cats’ finished look – not a question most directors would expect to be asked on the promotion trail, but a near-unavoidably salient one in this case – his answer was an expert PR play: having only officially finished the film 36 hours before, he was simply glad to be showing it at all. “I’m very happy to be here with it fully finished, and yeah, we’ll let the audience decide, but it’s come a long way since that first trailer.”
It’s being left to the actors, it seems, to take a more defensive approach. “I thought that reaction [to the trailer] was absolutely ludicrous,” Ian McKellen fumed in an interview this week, going on to declare the finished film “an absolute classic”. “I can tell those doubters who’ve only seen snippets of a trailer that they’re absolutely wrong, and if they don’t agree with me, then keep away.” Hooper’s more measured “let the audience decide” line is harder to argue with. Never a film made for critics, and with its awards-season hopes looking ever leaner, Cats will be counting on a vast, breathless public – one both uninformed of and uninterested in its production and scheduling complications – to make those sleepless nights worthwhile.
