By Another year of cinema has passed, which means it’s time for our second annual Golden Cages awards, the only end-of-the-year awards program featuring everyone’s favorite actor as a screaming statuette! Over the next two weeks leading up to the Academy Awards, we at Flixist will be announcing our winners across seventeen different categories for what we consider the best achievements in film in 2019. Why do we wait so long into the year to do this? Because we can! So sit back, relax, and enjoy the awards.
It’s not everyday you see a movie fall completely flat on its face. From the features leading to the initial trailer to how the trailers themselves were framed, Cats was pitched as being a magical experience, a beautiful trip through a fantasy world, a piece of ART. Even the marketing right up until release painted the movie as being operatic of sorts, with a billowing golden poster featuring a cat dancing ballet, boasting about how Academy Award nominated actors and directors are a part of the production. Nearly six months of buildup all led to probably the greatest punchline of 2019; the revelation that Cats wasn’t just bad, but an unmitigated disaster.
How much of a disaster is Cats? Nearly every actor involved with the production distanced themselves from it as soon as it released. The movie released to theaters unfinished with “Movie DLC” having to be rushed out the replace current copies of the film, this time with the effects more finished than they were before, but still unnatural and uncomfortable. Universal removed the movie from its “For Your Consideration” awards campaign, which for perspective, included Abominable. Abominable was seen as a more viable Oscars contender than Cats was. Last, and certainly not least, Cats is on track to bow as one of the biggest box office bombs of 2019.
Back when I reviewed Cats, I said some fairly not nice things about the movie and I still stand by them. There are times after I give a bad review that I may be somewhat repentant on being too harsh, but I have no remorse for what I said about Cats. To see a movie fail on the level that Cats did was something that doesn’t happen all to often, once in a decade even. There are some people that have seen it that are more positive to the movie, saying that it at least went all in on its insanity, but when the results are as bad as they are I couldn’t care less that it was trying to stand out from the crowd. A bad idea is still a bad idea, plain and simple.
I’m not the only one who has eviscerated Cats upon release with several groups online saying that it’s a fun movie to watch if you’re drunk or high out of your mind. The fact that you need to be intoxicated or in an altered state of consciousness to get some modicum of enjoyment out of Cats isn’t a good thing, and I’d wager that you wouldn’t even get some good laughs out of it. During the first 15-20 minutes? Sure. The dancing cockroaches with human faces being eaten by Rebel Wilson will see to that. Afterwards? The movie just becomes a formulaic drab that becomes boring and tedious to sit through.
Compared to every other movie that came out in 2019, Cats scrapes the bottom of the barrel. It didn’t have any repugnant messages, starred John Travolta, or was just a straight-up snuff film, but Cats was a momentous failure that someone should have noticed wasn’t going to work out. For being pretentiousness personified, and for delivering us solid nightmare fuel for months, as well as being just a bad movie, Cats fairly easily wins out Golden Cage for Worst Movie. Congratulations. Now let’s spay this movie.
