10 Movies That Should Never Have Bombed At The Box Office (But Totally Did)
7. Cats
In the future, possibly even now, the 2019 release of the musical Cats will result in numerous case studies just to understand what the blooming heck went wrong. Teens will study it in film studies, and historians will ramble on in essays about the mistakes that were made. Evidently, based on the box office gross, there were a lot of them.
Because it was based on the wildly successful stage musical from Andrew Lloyd Webber, which has the distinction of having won both Tony Awards and Laurence Olivier Awards, everybody expected Cats to do something similar to what Les Misérables did in 2012. After all, it was directed by the same man. However, it earned nowhere near the $400 million Les Mis did. In fact, it didn't even make 1/4 of that.
On a budget that got close to $100 million, it only managed to rake back in $75 million at a usually profitable Christmas period. Half of that was probably from people just going to see if it was as bad as everyone was saying it was. The fact the movie got savaged by critics and audiences was obviously a problem, and it even got a quick edit to rectify wonky CGI weeks after its release. Fundamentally though, the movie was just a load of nonsense and singing.
The only thing that Universal can do for Cats to make back its budget?#Releasethebuttholecut.