Andrew Lloyd Webber Hated The 'Cats' Movie So Much That He Had To Get A Dog

Published October 7, 2021

Sooner or later, you're going to see some bad movies in your life.

No matter how diligent you are about screening for reviews, you're going to find something that seems right up your alley only to learn that it couldn't be further from what you wanted. Granted, this can sometimes work out in its own way if we're talking about a movie that's just stupid enough to be lovable, but that's not always what happens.

Although the infamous 2019 film adaptation of the musical Cats has its fans, most viewers considered it so unspeakably awful that you could never convince them to see it again.

And in the case of the musical's original composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, it was apparently enough to make him cross the floor and start being a dog person.

You never really know how an artist will feel about adaptations of their work, and that holds particularly true with Webber.

Because while he told Variety that he doesn't think anybody could have played Eva Peron in Evita better than Madonna, he was less impressed with the similarly-acclaimed Jesus Christ Superstar movie from 1973.

That also goes for Joel Schumacher's 2004 Phantom of the Opera adaptation, but it sounds like neither of these films annoyed him as much as Tom Hooper's Cats.

As Webber put it, "'Cats’ was off-the-scale all wrong."

Universal Pictures via YouTube

Although he didn't go into detail as to went wrong with it — that might a pretty time-consuming pursuit, after all — he did say that there didn't seem to be "any understanding" on the part of the filmmakers as to why the music resonated with audiences in the first place.

In his words, "I saw it and I just thought, ‘Oh, God, no.’"

His reaction was apparently strong enough that it convinced him to get a dog for the first time in his "70-odd years on this planet."

But whether or not this gesture was done as an ironic joke, it turned out to a well-timed move as the pup would soon prove his "constant companion" once the COVID-19 pandemic emerged.

As he put it, "So the one good thing to come out of it is my little Havanese puppy."

And he has since arranged to have this puppy recognized as his therapy dog so he can travel with it.

And once again, it seems that Cats indirectly did him a solid in this department once he applied for this recognition.

As he said, "The airline wrote back and said, ‘Can you prove that you really need him?’ And I said ‘Yes, just see what Hollywood did to my musical Cats.’ Then the approval came back with a note saying, ‘No doctor’s report required.’”

h/t: Variety

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