'Cats' Featurette: New Feline Footage Brings New Dancing Nightmares

Universal's adaptation of the long-running Broadway musical Cats is coming to theaters in December. Much like a real cat throwing up on your carpet, there's nothing you can do to stop it. The first glimpse behind the scenes and the much buzzed about trailer have already fueled plenty of nightmares featuring an all-star cast covered by digital fur technology, but in case you needed more inspiration for some horror story you're writing, there's a new Cats featurette for you to feast on.

Taylor Swift, a self-professed cat lover, looks positively giddy about being able to come to work and pretend to be a cat while James Corden admits that this whole production sounds totally bonkers (and we agree with him 100%). But most of the rest of the cast, such as Jennifer Hudson, Idris Elba, Jason Derulo, Laurie Davidson, and newcomer Francesca Hayward, are playing it straight and talking about the various dance styles in the movie, moving swiftly and lightly like a cat, and plenty more.

The more we see from Cats, the more questions that I have. As someone who has never seen the Broadway musical but has a general idea of what the premise of the story is, I still find myself wondering just how this movie is going to fill out a feature length running time. Can the simultaneously mesmerizing and horrifying cat-human hybrids maintain audience attention for an extended period of time with song and dance? I guess if people endured the play, they can see it all over again with visual effects going against every law of nature.

Universal Pictures and Working Title's Cats is a most-unexpected film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's beloved smash musical "Cats" and the poems from "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," by T.S. Eliot. Oscar®-winning director Tom Hooper (The King's Speech, Les Misérables, The Danish Girl) brings astonishing new technology to transform his cast members.

One of the longest-running shows in West End and Broadway history, "Cats" received its world premiere at the New London Theatre in 1981—where it played for 21 record-breaking years and almost 9,000 performances. The groundbreaking production based on T.S. Eliot's "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" was the winner of the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards for Best Musical. In 1983 the Broadway production became the recipient of seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and ran for an extraordinary 18 years.

Cats prances into theaters on December 20, 2019.