Universal is not fooling around with Cats. There's a (presumably) gargantuan budget on the line but an insanely high level of brand awareness will help it turn a profit and they surely know that Oscar buzz wouldn't hurt toward that goal, either. This promo for the teaser (due Friday), which has no actual footage from the movie, is playing just like an FYC ad for the film's cast and crew...
Jennifer Hudson doing her second screen musical. In both she was gifted with the awards magnet role. We'll see.
The Oscar nominating process begins 169 days from now but we guess they figured there's no time like the present? The screen adaptation of the iconic stage musical has been rumored or joked about (hi, Six Degrees of Separation) or in actual development since practically the day the stage musical opened in the summer of 1981 in London. It was an instant smash, transferring to Broadway by October 1982 and then running for an unholy length of time on both sides of the Atlantic.
Tom Hooper's last musical Les Miserables was a worldwide blockbuster ($441 million on a $61 million budget) but super polarizing. Will this one be, too?
There's not much to take away from this hard sell tease other than that they've cast a few truly excellent dancers to mix in with the less naturally gifted at movement movie stars or pop stars and that they're using real oversized props just like they did in the stage production (so that the human actors look small as the cats).
Since the trailer is coming Friday and we've been needing to revise the Oscar charts anyway, we'll have an all category wide update Saturday or Sunday, okay?
Will we get actual footage of Cats on Friday or just some title design tease with a whiff of someone singing? Stay tuned!