Taylor Swift in Tom Hooper's 'Cats'
In the “good” timeline, this weekend saw Universal celebrating a rock-solid debut for their live-action adaptation of Wicked. Buoyed by good reviews, a buzzy cast and marquee characters beyond just a reliance on the IP, Wicked defied gravity and Star Wars to give Universal another big Christmas season musical hit. Alas, thanks to Barry Allen and/or Marty McFly, we’re not living in that timeline. Instead, we’re living in one where, despite Wicked being announced as a Christmas 2019 release way back in June of 2016, Universal opened not Wicked but Cats. Alas, as feared, the popularity (or at least awareness) of the long-running Andrew Lloyd Webber show did not translate to audience interest in a live-action movie version.
On paper, I’d wager that spending $100 million on Tom Hooper-directed Cats flick scheduled for a Christmas debut was a pretty safe bet. Les Misérables earned $148 million domestic and $442 million worldwide on a $61 million budget, while the year-end spot has been a successful home to the likes of Into the Woods ($214 million), La La Land ($441 million), Sing ($634 million), Pitch Perfect 3 ($185 million), The Greatest Showman ($434 million) and Mary Poppins Returns ($350 million). It’s also been the home to over/under $150 million grossers like The Phantom of the Opera, Sweeney Todd and Annie, but I digress. The live-action musical has been a relatively safe bet for the holidays for the last 15 years.
Throw in an all-star cast (Taylor Swift, Idris Elba, Judi Dench, Jennifer Hudson, James Cordon, Rebel Wilson, etc.) plus one of the longest running shows in Broadway history, and it wasn’t exactly spending $175 million on a Dolittle remake. Alas, Universal’s Cats pulled the feline equivalent of a wet vomit on newly vacuumed carpet, just inches away from the tiled floor no less, grossing just $6.5 million in its opening weekend. That includes a C+ Cinemascore and a miserable (for a kid-targeted musical) 2.5x multiplier. Sure, The Greatest Showman earned $184 million from an $8.8 million Fri-Sun ($13.5 million Wed-Sun) opening two years ago, but, all due respect, Cats, at least the movie version, is no The Greatest Showman.
The songs in the Hugh Jackman P.T. Barnum biopic are a lot catchier, so its “essentially ten music videos strung together” structure was the definition of “painless.” Cats has the same structure, with even less of a conventional narrative, but the songs aren’t (in my subjective opinion) as good so the whole thing suffers. Even legs like Annie ($86 million from a $16 million debut in 2014) gets Cats to just $35 million domestic. Barring Jumanji or Greatest Showman-worthy legs (or big numbers overseas), it looks like Cats, based on the Andrew Lloyd Webber stage musical, is one of those properties that audiences have heard of but aren’t necessarily interested in in terms of seeing a live-action movie version.
Moreover, as audiences’ tastes have shifted more to marquee characters over marquee IP (or marquee movie stars), Cats doesn’t really have any excessively popular characters to sell. Throw in brutal reviews and six months of online mockery, and, well, this isn’t like Aladdin where audiences actually wanted to see a live-action Aladdin movie and wanted to see Will Smith as the Genie. Cats was an IP that wasn’t so much insanely popular as well-known. It was a weighted coin toss, and the movie is both every bit as terrible/wonderful as the stage show and guaranteed to become a camp cult classic. Nonetheless, Universal needs to get its ass in gear and give us that promised Wicked movie!
Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman and Margot Robbie in Jay Roach's 'Bombshell'
Jay Roach’s Bombshell expanded into wide release (1,480 theaters) in its second weekend and was met with resounding indifference. The $32 million, R-rated dramedy earned just $5.075 million this weekend, giving it a mediocre $3,429 per-theater average and a $5.484 million ten-day cume. The Lionsgate release, about the women whose sexual harassment allegations caused Roger Ailes to step down as the head of Fox News, has earned mixed-positive reviews (I wasn’t a fan, but you are allowed to disagree) but plenty of awards attention for the film and its stars (Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, Margot Robbie and John Lithgow). But folks didn’t want to go to the movies to watch women get harassed and/or assaulted by powerful men.
Lionsgate is in a pretty happy Oscar position right now, as they’ve got both a conventional Oscar-friendly release and a buzzy/leggy commercial and critical smash in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out that could itself qualify as an Oscar contender through sheer popularity. And, yes, Bombshell could easily leg out over the holiday and into Oscar season, but even legs like Second Act ($39.2 million from a $6.5 million debut on this weekend in 2018) would still only give Bombshell a $32 million domestic finish. Fortunately it didn’t cost as much as Annapurna’s $60 million Vice, so if it can leg out it can at least end in a spot where decent overseas numbers can turn it into a hit.
The challenge, not unlike Black Christmas, is getting audiences to shell out movie theater money and time to watch a film about women being treated terribly by powerful men. Sure, the marketing has sold the “fun” in this mostly light dramedy, but this is still essentially asking audiences to pay to see Robbie, Theron and Kidman being abused and harassed by sexist superiors and coworkers. Audiences, especially (generally speaking) women, don’t necessarily want to race out to the theater to watch something that explicitly reminds them of the horrors of the modern world. This is little different than the commercial draw of a “fun” movie like Ford v Ferrari versus a “no fun” movie like Ad Astra.
