I like The Phantom.
Given how different they are, I’m actually quite impressed. He had clearly different goals and approaches to both shows and made things that are very good renditions within those spaces.
The Cats space doesn’t appeal to me, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize that it’s a solid version of what it is.
If the same person had written both Twilight and Fight Club, I’d be willing to call them a genius. But I’d only read one of the two. 
Elaine Paige was the original Grizabella when Cats opened in London; she reprised the role for the 1998 movie. Betty Buckley can sing “Memories”, but it belongs to Dame Elaine.
Hm. I’ve definitely seen the musical. And I definitely haven’t seen Starlight.
If it’s a false memory, I don’t know where it came from since it doesn’t look like there are any other roller skating musicals.
I feel like, when I watched it, it was a small venue (maybe a traveling production or a local production?) Possibly they did something weird?
But I do feel safe on the 70s description:
The title of the song is MEMORY. A Streisand bio I read referred to Elaine Paige’s cover of the song hitting the British charts.
Get your facts right, dammit.
How small or big are the cats in the trailer supposed to be? (I see comments above about inconsistent dimensions but couldn’t really tell from the clips.) A real cat standing on two legs should be able to reach up and grab the doorknob or thereabouts.
You can tell the problem with size from the trailer. It struck me immediately the first time I saw it.
See the pics on this tweet.
There are other shots where a cat on a bed looks out of proportion, and a cat’s head is smaller than a light bulb.
I know almost nothing about *Cats *but from the race kerfuffle I know the white cat in the screen shots is supposed to be a kitten, not full grown.
I misremember where I came across it (may have been in the DVD extras for the 1998 adaptation), but I do recall that Victoria was very young — just a bit older than a kitten — and that she was attending her first Jellicle Ball.
But in the trailer she’s the same size as all the other cats.
From a tweet in that link, wow this person took 5 mins in Photoshop and made it look infinitely better!
If the filmmakers could just take the time and fix the CGI to be more like that, it would fix everything. That’s what’s fucked up, they have human noses and lips.
But… but… they paid all that money to have big stars in the movie! If they fix the faces then nobody will be able to recognize them, and all that money will be wasted…
And if they put longer fur on them and fix that ‘shaved’ look and hide the breasts, then we won’t be able to see how sexy Francesca Hayward and Taylor Swift are…
Big stars and sexy looks sell! :D
Cats can have 8 breasts. Doesn’t that make them four times as sexy?
Just adding the black line for the philtrum makes a big difference. They could have done that with makeup alone.
Bumping this thread, since the critics’ reviews are now out.
It’s currently 16% on Rotten Tomatoes. Some comments:
“The only realistic way to fix Cats would be to spay it.”
“My eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes.”
“Please wipe this movie from my ‘Memory’.”
“Cats is a slick and tedious and weird-looking exercise in self-indulgence.”
“Tom Hooper’s jarring fever dream of a spectacle is like something that escaped from Dr. Moreau’s creature laboratory.”
“Tom Hooper’s outlandishly tacky interpretation seems destined to become one of those once-in-a-blue-moon embarrassments that mars the résumés of great actors.”
“For the most part, Cats is both a horror and an endurance test, a dispatch from some neon-drenched netherworld where the ghastly is inextricable from the tedious.”
“Cats is an insane musical experiment gone wrong. It is truly like nothing cinema has ever seen. The question is, is it something cinema actually wanted?”
“It’s literally incredible. I hope I never see it again.”
The critics certainly have their claws into it!
Personally I’ve never seen the original in any possible way but heard about it a lot (and all that gifs and cut-out from scene pictures…)
IIMHO, it’s legendary enough to be a reason alone to watch it.
I note that there was a more recent trailer that looked a lot better than the one discussed in July. They added the stuff that was shown in that Photoshop. People need to remember that early trailers often have worse CGI than the final cut–sometimes teaser trailers are there to see if they got the CGI right.
Personally, I never had problems with either trailer, and actually was okay with the look of the first one. However, I have always questioned how well it could be adapted into a movie, as it is phenomenally odd, and has no real plot structure.
Or so I’ve read–I’ve also never seen any version of it. I just know the song “Memories,” and even then only the part that was in our Broadway medley in choir.
It’s easy enough to watch all the numbers from the London stage version, which was filmed in 1998.
This is probably the best version, and it’s on YouTube:
And T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
These poems about cats are the basis for the musical.
oh hell everyone knew this was going to be a fascinating train wreck from the moment it was announced but did the play have the idol like competition as the plot?
so far rebel wilsonseems to get the best line in the previews on tv …one cat ends a song and she remarks “wow he hit some high notes i wonder who neutered him poor thing”