When the Cats trailer first came out, I called it the final nail in the coffin that 2019 was the year of CGI Hell, and not to toot my own horn here, but…CALLED IT!
Yes, Cats is a box office and critical flop. Critics are having a lot of fun losing their minds over how bad this movie is, writing some of the trippiest, most existential rants about the weird places this movie took them emotionally and mentally. As of writing, the film has a 17% on Rotten Tomatoes, and its domestic opening weekend was a little over $6.5 million domestically, less than ten percent of its $95 million budget.
But Universal Pictures is trying to save at least one of this film’s nine lives by releasing a patch to all theaters fixing issues with its graphics. Apparently the version that premiere in theaters had several weird graphics problems. As iO9 reviewer Alex Cranz details in his critique, there are several issues including cats with missing fur, limbs out of place, weird coloring issues, and even just a random man standing amongst the cats. The patch will, very likely, fix these issues but it’s embarrassing that they happened in the first place.
Many theaters could download the patch from Universal directly, but older theaters who couldn’t access it this way were receiving hard drives in the mail, set to arrive by Christmas Eve. While it is unlikely that this half-finished version of the movie will ever see the light of day again, it’s still a fascinating development in the history of pop culture.
