Director Tom Hooper Reasons Why ‘Cats’ Underperformed

The film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Cats” musical has received a bad critical reception following the lifted review embargo. The “Cats” Rotten Tomatoes score sits a lowly 17% rotten at the time of writing with many reviewers call into question everything from CGI to casting.

To defend his “Cats” movie and to express the troubles in bringing the film to life, director Tom Hooper sat down with Entertainment Weekly on Wednesday. The director, whose “The King’s Speech” won him an Oscar in 2010, expressed humor in the backlash that evolved from the first “Cats” trailer and the many memes that followed.

“I didn’t think it was going to be a big deal, and it was obviously much more of a big deal than I thought,” said Hooper. “Reading some of the commentary was pretty entertaining.”

Though the director may be getting a kick out of the many memes, it’s made clear that the trailer outrage had a slight impact on him. The relatively poor feedback awarded from that first “Cats” trailer led the director to change certain aspects of “every single cat to some extent, whether small or large.”

The “Cats” movie cast is stacked with well-known faces, from Taylor Swift and Idris Elba to Jason Derulo and Jennifer Hudson. Having such an all-star group, Hooper wanted to ensure that said faces really stood out under the feline visual effects, which may or may not have added to the workload.

“I think probably my original dream to use a lot of the human face had gotten perhaps a bit lost in that process of rushing to make that first trailer,” he explained.

Following its world premiere on Monday night, many of the initial reactions to the film were mixed. The question of is “Cats” good remained relatively open, until Wednesday when the reviews began trickling out en masse. Despite the all-star cast, critics thus far have deemed it’s not the best representation of Webber’s “Cats” musical. For example, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wove his “Cats” review into his own musical, calling it “a purr-fectly dreadful hairball of woe.”

Still, Hooper’s obsession with the original work since childhood lends credence to his craft and why he made the "Cats” movie in the first place. He said: “We got the audiocassette, and I listened to it literally until the cassette wore out.”

“Cats” debuts in theaters on Friday.