In perhaps a new peak of Internet self-isolation mania, people on social media were captivated all day yesterday with the proposition that there was an intentional cut of Cats with full-on feline buttholes. Yes, Dame Judi Dench herself may have starred in a film that purposely highlighted cat genitalia.
This all started when Seth Rogen, actor/producer/legendary stoner, live-tweeted his high viewing of Cats (he wisely quit watching after about an hour). To be fair, it is not a great film, whether you’re high or not. The real fans of Cats are generally either people who enjoy the uncanny valley a little too much, or past theatre kids who enjoyed the original music. Jack Waz, a writer on Disney’s upcoming Howard the Duck series, was the first to suggest the existence of the Cats Butthole Cut, with a tweet replying to writer/director Ben Mekler about the making of the film:
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
A hashtag, #ReleaseTheButtholeCut (a parody of a similar hashtag that we don’t need to get into here), soon took off on Twitter, and Vanity Fair actually did a deep dive on this, going so far as to contact Universal Pictures, who seemed highly amused, and Mill Film, the Canadian VFX company behind our favorite musical theatre not-so masterpiece. Universal did actually say that they couldn’t comment on the story, so you never know.
But alas, we can’t have nice things, and Mekler tweeted an update from an anonymous VFX crewmember debunking the existence of the Butthole Cut, and saying that any cat genitalia and/or cat buttholes were likely entirely unintentional:
URGENT #ReleaseTheButtholeCut update/clarification, emailed to me by a CATS VFX crewmember who has asked to remain anonymous pic.twitter.com/nmta9CG08E
— ben mekler (@benmekler) March 18, 2020
Yes, it was supposedly an “accident.” One has to ask, though: how did “the skin and fur sim” get rendered to fold in that particular way?
Cats is already a notorious film. It practically dominated the Razzie Awards, which were announced via a YouTube video due to the current pandemic. There were Rowdy screenings across the country at now-shuttered Alamo Drafthouses. Rowdy screenings involved basically acting like cats during the screenings, with audience members encouraged to hiss and meow and growl at the screen. The film is now on-demand, so you can see for yourself why it caused such pandemonium before pandemonium became the hip thing. You could host your own Rowdy screening, all alone or with your equally trapped roommates. Maybe you would scare your pets, if you have them, but it might release some steam.
Animation has a long, rumored history of having “dirty” cuts behind the scenes, with more than a few Disney movies getting called out for inserting blue jokes or inappropriate-for-kids shots in their films. The Rescuers was really the only film to have something explicit in it: 3.4 million copies of the film were recalled due to a brief topless shot (not a topless mouse, either).
The Cats Butthole Cut has its own Snopes article now. No, really. This is the state of the world. #ReleaseTheButtholeCut, if it exists. To be fair, if you have pets, you’re probably seeing a lot of their buttholes these days.
