After disastrous reviews, Cats is already receiving a re-release with improved CGI, but this won't fix the film's many problems. From the moment the first Cats trailer dropped in August, audiences knew that it had the potential to be one of 2019’s true cinematic train-wrecks. Months of social media mockery set the bar high for what audiences should expect from the movie but not even the most ludicrous predictions could have prepared viewers for just how staggeringly bad the final product is. Cats is a true disaster that seems destined to be a midnight movie cult classic in years to come.

That’s not exactly what Universal or director Tom Hooper had in mind for their big-screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s wildly popular musical. After all, this was a film pushed out at Christmas to get the commercial clout as well as qualify in time for Oscars consideration. In its opening weekend, however, the reviews for Cats were scathing and its gross embarrassingly low. Cats bombed at the box office this weekend with only $6.5 million. By comparison, Frozen 2, which has been out for five weeks already, made $12.3 million, and the other major release of the weekend, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, took in $175.5 million. Essentially every aspect of Cats was mauled by the critics but it was the VFX that fell under especially harsh scrutiny.

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To put it bluntly, the CGI is terrible, with actors’ bodies and faces falling out of sync frequently and the much-vaunted “digital fur technology” looking oddly slapdash. In some places, you can clearly see the separation where actors’ faces are separated from the “fur” while others show the lines of ballet shoes under what are supposed to be bare feet. In the film’s climax, Judi Dench’s human hand, complete with wedding ring, is on display. It’s not just bad SFX: it’s shockingly unfinished work. Despite Hooper bragging that he worked up to the day of the movie's premiere adding the finishing touches, Universal announced that they are now sending out new versions of Cats with seemingly improved CGI. It's a panic move from a studio who seriously over-estimated their film's hype but it's also setting a disastrous precedent for the rest of the industry.

Two cats look up together in Cats.

Cats was never going to be brilliant but the camp value of the musical combined with the obvious hallucinogenic madness of the movie ensured that some would get some guilty pleasures out of it. The people who paid to see it on opening weekend and had a blast with an admittedly bad movie did so because of the shoddy effects, among other reasons. Universal removing that experience from audiences is another reminder of how they just didn't get what Cats was about or who it was for. It certainly would be cheaper for them to lean into the madness and let the film become a so-bad-it's-good extravaganza. The precedent this could also set for the business also opens up endless questions. How long after a release can you continue to alter a movie? At what point do you have to stop and just let it be? Is it fair to audiences paying to see one version of the film, only to then be told the "better" version is coming soon?

Bad CGI typically happens because of two things: Lack of money and lack of time. So much of the reporting around the movie focused on how Hooper and Universal wanted to rush Cats out in time for awards season, and it's never a good sign when your director is talking about pulling a 36-hour crunch up to the day of the premiere to get it ready. That means that the effects team working on Cats undoubtedly had to put in massive amounts of overtime with tight constraints on budget (reportedly $95 million) to meet a very quick release. When the trailer dropped and audiences mocked it, the FX team clearly had to do overhauls on certain characters and scenes to make improvements. Now they are expected to keep working after the film is now available for paying audiences to fix something that was, frankly, unfixable. It’s cruel and yet another example of how Hollywood exploits and marginalizes effects teams (see also the VFX company that worked on The Lion King shutting down one of their studios despite that movie’s huge grosses).

The reason Cats’ effects are unfixable is that the film never should have had this design in the first place. Realistic human-cats with those body shapes and faces was always a misguided choice and one that posed impossible problems for the VFX teams. The fault lies with Hooper and Universal, not the effects team, and it’s sad that they will suffer because of this. The wider repercussions of this re-release are vast but the biggest cost will once again be that of the workers who face all the ire but none of the glory.

NEXT: Why Cats Movie Is So Hated (Before Release)