Review embargo just lifted for Cats. Apparently it's purr-ty bad. This is getting absolutely destroyed by critics. Some of these reviews are legit "worst of the year" contenders. Lots of savage (and hilarious) 1/10 or 2/10 reviews. This movie just went from Oscar-hopeful to Razzies-favorite. It's a total trainwreck.

On the bright side, there will at least be some award-winning puns/memes to come out of this. Looks like the trailer backlash was warranted after all.

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 19% - 115 Reviews - 3.75 Average Score

Rotten Tomatoes Critics Consensus:

Despite its fur-midable cast, this Cats adaptation is a clawful mistake that will leave most viewers begging to be put out of their mew-sery.

Metacritic Score: 33/100 - 41 Reviews - "Generally Unfavorable Reviews"

Boston Globe

My eyes are burning. Oh God, my eyes.

Collider

Can you make a movie so bad that the Academy takes back your Best Director Oscar? Asking for Tom Hooper.

The Beat

Cats is the worst thing to happen to cats since dogs.

Hollywood Reporter

Cat-astrophic.

LA Times

"Cats” is both a horror and an endurance test.

Slashfilm

There is a thin line between idiocy and genius, and Cats pukes a hairball on it and rubs its ass all over it.

Variety

Nine may not be enough lives for some of the stars to live down their involvement in this poorly conceived and executed adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical.

Little White Lies

I felt the light inside me slowly fading.

The Playlist

Once Tom Hooper's 110 minutes of Cats are over, theater is dead. And we unchosen ones are left, tragically, to continue living.

New York Times

It's amazing to see what Adult Swim can accomplish with a $100 million budget. I never knew Tom Hooper was capable of making a surrealist nightmare that would rival Jodorowsky, that could baffle David Lynch, that would prompt even the dark god Cthulhu to emit an impressed eldritch shriek of “nehehehehehe”

Vulture

To assess Cats as good or bad feels like the entirely wrong axis on which to see it. It is, with all affection, a monstrosity.

The Daily Telegraph

Glad to report that Cats is everything you’d hoped for and more: a mesmerisingly ugly fiasco that makes you feel like your brain is being eaten by a parasite. A viewing experience so stressful that it honestly brought on a migraine.

Den of Geek

One of the weirdest and most garish monstrosities to be birthed out of the Hollywood studio system in this century.

Vanity Fair

It’s an ugly stray who smells bad and should not be invited into your home, certainly. And yet it is its own kind of living creature, worthy of at least some basic compassion.

The Guardian

A purr-fectly dreadful hairball of woe. 1/5.

Indiewire

Tom Hooper’s feline musical is an absurd and exuberant mess. This visually dense adaptation of the Andrew Lloyd Webber hit is at once too crazy for this world, and not quite crazy enough.

Newsday

Fans of the stage musical may swoon, but others will be severely allergic.

The Wrap

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s feline fantasy musical becomes a garish hairball. It’s hard to “ruin” Webber’s already strange musical, but Tom Hooper’s wrongheaded attempt certainly tries. Tom Hooper’s jarring fever dream of a spectacle is like something that escaped from Dr. Moreau’s creature laboratory instead of a poet’s and a composer’s feline (uni)verse, an un-catty valley hybrid of physical and digital that unsettles and crashes way more often than it enchants.

Bleeding Cool

Cats is a strange beast to begin with, but the combination of strange CGI makes the translation from stage to screen even worse.

Slant

This adaptation gets straight to the heart of the material, which is basically two hours of stray cats introducing themselves.

Rendy Reviews

On a scale of one to Zemeckis, Hooper's Cats boldly goes beyond the uncanny valley and creates a tier of its own.

Screen Junkies

A spectacular disaster...This movie feels like a prank but I don't know on whom.

The Jam Report

The most inexplicably bizarre film of the year, it's jawdropping for all the wrong reasons.

RTE Ireland

First off, full disclosure - I am not a cat person. Second off - after watching this frankly mortifying film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats, I'm not altogether sure I am a movie person anymore either.

Plot:

A tribe of cats must decide yearly which one will ascend to the Heaviside Layer and come back to a new life.

Director:

Tom Hooper (The King's Speech, The Danish Girl, Les Miserables)

Budget:

$95,000,000

Release Date:

December 19, 2019

Starring:

• James Corden
• Judi Dench
• Idris Elba
• Ian McKellen
• Jennifer Hudson
• Jason Derulo
• Rebel Wilson
• Taylor Swift
• Francesca Hayward

Runtime:

110 Minutes

Company That Probably Regrets Spending $125M On This Movie:

Universal