Last Monday, a most troubling message arrived in my DMs.
"New Cats trailer," it read. "Tuesday."
Naturally, I immediately flew into a panic. I set off the alarm system in my house and called the local elementary school, telling them I'd be coming by presently to pick up the kids (as it turns out, I don't have kids, and the judge has asked me to apologize for the unnecessary confusion and alarm this phone call caused). I was down in the bomb shelter, sweating profusely and re-cataloging the various canned goods and firearms I've been amassing over the past year and a half, when a second message arrived.
"Sorry, meant to say - next Tuesday."
In the moment, I breathed a sigh of relief. What a reprieve! What a gift! But then reality came crashing back down: yes, I'd been granted another week in a world without a second Cats trailer, but that week had to come to an end sooner or later (probably after seven days, the generally agreed-upon length of a week).
Well. It's Tuesday. And it is with profound regret and immeasurable sorrow that I must report the inevitable: the reprieve's over. The new Cats trailer is here.
The first Cats trailer was very light on plot details, which probably seemed par for the course to anyone unfamiliar with the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical upon which Tom Hooper's expensive new film is based. "That's what initial trailers do," these poor sods probably thought. "They're teasers in the literal sense of the word! The second trailer's usually more forthcoming with the details." Ah, but as anyone who's actually seen Cats (as I have, and at great personal cost) can attest, this is a bitter, cruel joke: if the first trailer seemed light on plot, that's because Cats barely has any plot. It's literally just a three-hour stage show where a few dozen people in cat costumes scream their backstories and names at you until one of them dies. Somehow, it is also iconic.
This trailer offers a smidge more plot than the previous trailer did - we learn, via voiceover and onscreen text, that the titular cats are competing to see which of them will get to die and be "reborn into another life" - but largely this trailer exists to show us that the cats themselves are looking a bit sharper and less horrifying (though still not completely un-horrifying!) than they did in the teaser trailer. Hooper's film looks big and expensive and more than a little obnoxious (there's quite a bit of ha-ha physical comedy here which does not provoke any actual ha-ha's), and I'm honestly just kind of astounded that this thing exists. People are going to go see this, in a movie theater. Probably with their families.
May God help us all. Tom Hooper's Cats hits theaters on December 20th.