VFX specialist on 'Cats' confirms the rumoured 'butthole cut'
One of the visual effects crew on Tom Hooper's disastrous Cats movie has confirmed the horrifying rumours of a cut of the movie littered with cat bumholes.
The talk began back in March, after a tweet which claimed that a VFX artist was hired to remove the offending anatomy in post-production.
A VFX producer friend of a friend was hired in November to finish some of the 400 effects shots in @catsmovie. His entire job was to remove CGI buttholes that had been inserted a few months before. Which means that, somewhere out there, there exists a butthole cut of Cats
— Jack Waz (@jackwaz) March 18, 2020
Said rumour was even promoted by Seth Rogen, who got high, watched the movie and then live-tweeted his bafflement.
Release the Butthole Cut of Cats!! https://t.co/C2VgPqSv1L
— Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) March 18, 2020
Others, including director Rian Johnson, have taken up the clarion call of #ReleaseTheButtholeCut.
And now, it seems, it's not merely the stuff of myth and legend.
Speaking to the Daily Beast, one of the VFX specialists on the film has confirmed the existence of the 'butthole cut'.
Read more: Seth Rogen got high and watched Cats
“When we were looking at the playbacks, we were like, ‘What the hell? You guys see that?!’” the source said.
“We paused it. We went to call our supervisor, and we’re like, ‘There’s a f**king a**hole in there! There’s buttholes!’ It wasn’t prominent but you saw it.
“And you [were] just like, ‘What the hell is that?... There’s a f**king butthole in there.’ It wasn’t in your face - but at the same time, too, if you’re looking, you’ll see it.
“There was nobody that said, ‘We want buttholes.’ It was one of those things that just happened and slipped through.”
Read more: Cats sweeps the board at the Razzies
And while this is all fun and games, the source had a few choice allegations to make about director Hooper, who was branded 'horrible', disrespectful', 'demeaning' and 'condescending' to the VFX crew on the movie, who reportedly worked 90-hour weeks in the lead up to release.
“He talks to you like you’re garbage,” the source added. “It was pure, almost slavery for us, how much work we put into it with no time, and everything was difficult.
“We were so rushed on the project that we’d have no time for anything. So when people say, ‘Oh, the effects were not good,’ or ‘The animation’s not good,’ or anything, that’s not our fault. We have no time.
“Six months to do a two-minute trailer and four months to do a film of an hour and a half. My math is pretty good... You could figure that doesn’t make any sense.”
Hooper has not commented on the claims, but the film's failure was pretty historic.
Critics hated it, and audiences stayed away in droves, meaning that it lost the Universal studio in the region of $70 to $100 million, after making $75.4 million on its $95 million budget.
