![\"C\u00f3](\"https:\/\/scontent-cdg4-1.xx.fbcdn.net\/v\/t39.30808-6\/528062917_683958241363535_9011725016601574167_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_s600x600_tt6&_nc_cat=102&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=127cfc&_nc_ohc=MgtEbz77kQEQ7kNvwG3QTcg&_nc_oc=AdmfbM9C1bmTN5JKZex9QGDE47ToGWANMD8OqWRiz-u2HdGDiwhbIVj00PsytxNzUB8&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-cdg4-1.xx&_nc_gid=yAAT6yqdMLvv0pk4-Hlk4w&oh=00_AfVpHPx6CkGQPFP0WL55LnYW1nyyibnij572Pj81uV8Y_w&oe=6897B6DF\")
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It\u2019s not news that \u201cCats\u201d is a bad movie. Directed by Tom Hooper (a man who, between this disaster and his 2012 big-screen adaptation of \u201cLes Mis\u00e9rables,\u201d should be required to return his directing Oscar for \u201cThe King\u2019s Speech\u201d to the Academy), the movie uses Andrew Lloyd Webber\u2019s inscrutable and mostly plotless Broadway musical as its source material, and to say it\u2019s jarring, bizarre, and outright terrible is an\u00a0understatement. Also, Taylor Swift is in it.<\/p>\n
Let me backtrack for a moment and say this: The Broadway musical \u201cCats\u201d is not my personal cup of tea, but I\u2019m not here to crap all over it. It\u2019s one of the highest-grossing musicals in history, and to be absolutely fair, the fact that the stage version is plotless isn\u2019t a technically\u00a0bad 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 \u2026 and unfortunately for Swift and her co-stars Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson, and, uh, James Corden, it\u2019s a part of their creative histories now.<\/p>\n
So, who does Swift play in this feline-centered failure of a film?\u00a0That would be Bombalurina, a \u201cfemme fatale\u201d cat who\u2019s an acolyte of sorts of the evil kitty Macavity (Idris Elba). She sings one song in the film \u2014\u00a0\u201cMacavity: The Mystery Cat\u201d \u2014 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 \u201cBeautiful Ghosts,\u201d\u00a0which is performed by Francesca Hayward\u2019s \u201clead\u201d cat Victoria.)<\/p>\n
\u201cCats\u201d 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\u2019s a reason the film made the bottom 100 among IMDb\u2019s lowest rated movies.) So, what mean stuff did critics say, and did they even mention Swift\u2019s performance?<\/p>\n
Cats is bad \u2014 but it\u2019s not necessarily Taylor Swift\u2019s fault<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.slashfilm.com\/img\/gallery\/the-taylor-swift-movie-that-imdb-considers-one-of-the-worst-ever-made\/cats-is-bad-but-its-not-necessarily-taylor-swifts-fault-1753467427.jpg\")
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Universal Pictures
\nOnce again, Taylor Swift is\u00a0barely in Cats; she probably has the least screen time of any of the film\u2019s big advertised stars, so that\u2019s lucky for her \u2026 because the stink of the film didn\u2019t really stick to her. Critics absolutely lambasted the movie \u2014 it has a 19% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is just terrible by anyone\u2019s standards \u2014 but her name didn\u2019t really come up, so \u2026 good for her!<\/p>\n
As for those critics, some, like Jake Cole at Slant Magazine, pointed out that the musical isn\u2019t necessarily meant to be adapted:\u00a0\u201cThis adaptation gets straight to the heart of the material, which is basically two hours of stray cats introducing themselves.\u201d At TheWrap, Robert Abele was a bit more cutting and direct, writing, \u201cTom Hooper\u2019s jarring fever dream of a spectacle is like something that escaped from Dr. Moreau\u2019s creature laboratory, an un-catty valley hybrid of physical and digital that unsettles and crashes way more often than it enchants.\u201d Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Justin Chang also went for the jugular:\u00a0\u201cWith its grotesque design choices and busy, metronomic editing, \u2018Cats\u2019 is as uneasy on the eyes as a Hollywood spectacle can be, tumbling into an uncanny valley between mangy realism and dystopian artifice.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the opinion of someone who saw \u201cCats\u201d in theaters as sort of a bit (me), the funniest and most accurate reviews can be boiled down to a pithy one-liner. \u201cOh God, my eyes,\u201d Ty Burr wrote in the Boston Globe. \u201cI found it all exhausting,\u201d David Rooney wrote in The Hollywood Reporter. It can all be summed up, though, by Alissa Wilkinson\u2019s take for Vox: \u201cIt\u2019s literally incredible. I hope I never see it again.\u201d<\/p>\n
She may have starred in Cats, but don\u2019t worry about Taylor Swift too much<\/p>\n
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Kevin Winter\/tas24\/Getty Images
\nThese days, Taylor Swift isn\u2019t acting all that much anymore (which is, with the\u00a0utmost due respect, a good thing for the most part). Why? She\u2019s\u00a0busy!\u00a0From March 2023 to December 2024, Swift embarked on her globe-spanning Eras Tour, which presented her musical \u201ceras\u201d 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 \u201cAll Too Well\u201d for 25 hours by the time the tour concluded.) Swift\u2019s 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 \u201cTaylor\u2019s Version\u201d re-recordings, so all\u2019s well that ends well.) Also, she did\u00a0not appear in one of the last episodes of \u201cThe Handmaid\u2019s Tale.\u201d<\/p>\n
Swift may be one of the most famous \u201ccat ladies\u201d in the world \u2014 she has three \u2014 but with all this in mind, you might wonder how she feels about \u201cCats.\u201d\u00a0As the \u201cFortnight\u201d singer told Variety in 2020, she doesn\u2019t. \u201cI\u2019m happy to be here, happy to be nominated, and I had a really great time working on that weird-ass movie,\u201d she said of the Golden Globe nomination for \u201cBeautiful Ghosts,\u201d shortly before her documentary \u201cMiss Americana\u201d premiered at Sundance that year. \u201cI\u2019m not gonna retroactively decide that it wasn\u2019t the best experience. I never would have met Andrew Lloyd Webber or gotten to see how he works, and now he\u2019s my buddy. I got to work with the sickest dancers and performers. No complaints.\u201d Still, for fans of Swift and also good films, this was some disappointing output across the board.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll just say this. \u201cCats\u201d is the last movie I saw before the COVID-19 pandemic hit; the Eras Tour was my first post-quarantine concert. Swift\u2019s career has featured many highs and some notable lows, and we put up with stuff like \u201cCats\u201d to be rewarded with a three-hour career retrospective. As the songwriter says on one \u201creputation\u201d track, \u201cSo it goes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 Mis\u00e9rables,”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":86203,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-taylor-swifts"],"yoast_head":"\n