10 Films Substantially Different From Their Source Material
6. Cats
It is rare to find a film based on two sources - in this case, a stage musical and a book of verse - and manage to deviate from both of them. Is it a surprise, though, to find that the film has little bar the superficial in common with the poems which inspired it? Probably not. More surprising is how much the film deviates from its more immediate relative, the musical of the same name.
The original 1981 Andrew Lloyd Webber stage musical on which Cats is based is itself inspired by T.S. Eliot's 1939 poetry collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Whether the next step in media translation, from stage to screen, served Cats well can be gathered from the fact that the original Tony-award winning musical's London run was a staggering 21 years, whereas the 2019 film is now considered one of the worst major releases of all time, with a shocking 20% on Metacritic.
From god-awful CGI to the weird catnip sequence, the team behind 2019's Cats seemingly decided to tweak and alter always to the detriment of the source. The catnip material must stand out as the worst deviation of the lot and is genuinely baffling.