It’s not news that “Cats” is a bad movie. Directed by Tom Hooper (a man who, between this disaster and his 2012 big-screen adaptation of “Les Misérables,” should be required to return his directing Oscar for “The King’s Speech” to the Academy), the movie uses Andrew Lloyd Webber’s inscrutable and mostly plotless Broadway musical as its source material, and to say it’s jarring, bizarre, and outright terrible is an understatement. Also, Taylor Swift is in it.

Let me backtrack for a moment and say this: The Broadway musical “Cats” is not my personal cup of tea, but I’m not here to crap all over it. It’s one of the highest-grossing musicals in history, and to be absolutely fair, the fact that the stage version is plotless isn’t a technically bad thing. (To be really blunt, the runtime is made up of different cats introducing themselves until one of them is allowed to die.) Making it into a movie, though, was a patently terrible idea, and I say that with no due respect to Hooper … and unfortunately for Swift and her co-stars Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson, and, uh, James Corden, it’s a part of their creative histories now.

So, who does Swift play in this feline-centered failure of a film? That would be Bombalurina, a “femme fatale” cat who’s an acolyte of sorts of the evil kitty Macavity (Idris Elba). She sings one song in the film — “Macavity: The Mystery Cat” — and is never seen after she drugs a bunch of other felines at the Jellicle Ball with catnip. (Swift somehow escaped any further appearances, though she did pen an original song for the film with Webber called “Beautiful Ghosts,” which is performed by Francesca Hayward’s “lead” cat Victoria.)

“Cats” was an indisputable box office bomb and critical failure, to say nothing of the highly publicized problems with the visual effects when it first came out in December 2019. (Needless to say, there’s a reason the film made the bottom 100 among IMDb’s lowest rated movies.) So, what mean stuff did critics say, and did they even mention Swift’s performance?

Cats is bad — but it’s not necessarily Taylor Swift’s fault

Universal Pictures
Once again, Taylor Swift is barely in Cats; she probably has the least screen time of any of the film’s big advertised stars, so that’s lucky for her … because the stink of the film didn’t really stick to her. Critics absolutely lambasted the movie — it has a 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is just terrible by anyone’s standards — but her name didn’t really come up, so … good for her!

As for those critics, some, like Jake Cole at Slant Magazine, pointed out that the musical isn’t necessarily meant to be adapted: “This adaptation gets straight to the heart of the material, which is basically two hours of stray cats introducing themselves.” At TheWrap, Robert Abele was a bit more cutting and direct, writing, “Tom Hooper’s jarring fever dream of a spectacle is like something that escaped from Dr. Moreau’s creature laboratory, an un-catty valley hybrid of physical and digital that unsettles and crashes way more often than it enchants.” Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Justin Chang also went for the jugular: “With its grotesque design choices and busy, metronomic editing, ‘Cats’ is as uneasy on the eyes as a Hollywood spectacle can be, tumbling into an uncanny valley between mangy realism and dystopian artifice.”

In the opinion of someone who saw “Cats” in theaters as sort of a bit (me), the funniest and most accurate reviews can be boiled down to a pithy one-liner. “Oh God, my eyes,” Ty Burr wrote in the Boston Globe. “I found it all exhausting,” David Rooney wrote in The Hollywood Reporter. It can all be summed up, though, by Alissa Wilkinson’s take for Vox: “It’s literally incredible. I hope I never see it again.”

She may have starred in Cats, but don’t worry about Taylor Swift too much

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These days, Taylor Swift isn’t acting all that much anymore (which is, with the utmost due respect, a good thing for the most part). Why? She’s busy! From March 2023 to December 2024, Swift embarked on her globe-spanning Eras Tour, which presented her musical “eras” one at a time (sort of) across three and a half hours and which she performed an incredible 149 times, grossing $2 billion. (Context: Swift had sung her 10 minute version of “All Too Well” for 25 hours by the time the tour concluded.) Swift’s high-profile relationship with football player Travis Kelce has captured international attention as well, but even without her ever-present tour, Swift is still at the top of her game; her 12th album is rumored and, at the end of May 2025, Swift announced she had repurchased all of her master recordings after a years-long struggle to reclaim them from bad actors like Scooter Braun and Scott Borchetta. (This obviously sucked for someone like Swift, who takes pride in her creative work, but it was a boon for fans because we got the “Taylor’s Version” re-recordings, so all’s well that ends well.) Also, she did not appear in one of the last episodes of “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

Swift may be one of the most famous “cat ladies” in the world — she has three — but with all this in mind, you might wonder how she feels about “Cats.” As the “Fortnight” singer told Variety in 2020, she doesn’t. “I’m happy to be here, happy to be nominated, and I had a really great time working on that weird-ass movie,” she said of the Golden Globe nomination for “Beautiful Ghosts,” shortly before her documentary “Miss Americana” premiered at Sundance that year. “I’m not gonna retroactively decide that it wasn’t the best experience. I never would have met Andrew Lloyd Webber or gotten to see how he works, and now he’s my buddy. I got to work with the sickest dancers and performers. No complaints.” Still, for fans of Swift and also good films, this was some disappointing output across the board.

I’ll just say this. “Cats” is the last movie I saw before the COVID-19 pandemic hit; the Eras Tour was my first post-quarantine concert. Swift’s career has featured many highs and some notable lows, and we put up with stuff like “Cats” to be rewarded with a three-hour career retrospective. As the songwriter says on one “reputation” track, “So it goes.”