‘Cats’ Is Coming to the Silver Screen With Taylor Swift and Ian McKellen in Tow
This post is also available in: Español
If you’re a fan of musicals you’ll be excited that a Cats movie is finally in the works. Not just that, but some of the cast for the Cats movie has been announced, and we’re getting more excited by the minute. The new film is set to star Ian McKellen, James Corden, Jennifer Hudson and Taylor Swift.
In the new Cats movie, Jennifer Hudson will play Grizabella. The other roles have yet to be announced, but it’s been assumed Ian McKellen will play Old Deuteronomy — though we’ll have to see if that’s the case.
The upcoming film will be directed by Tom Hooper, who previously directed The King’s Speech, but most notably pertaining to this project, also the 2012 adaptation of Les Misérables. That live-action musical was a critical and commercial smash, winning three Oscars. Hooper will be working from a script by Lee Hall, famous for Billy Elliott. Hall has also written the script for the upcoming Rocketman biopic on Elton John.
The Cats movie will also feature a new song. Andrew Lloyd Webber, who composed the original musical, has written a new number for the kitten Victoria. He’s also floated the idea of writing more additional songs for the film.
Cats, Broadway’s fourth-longest running musical (it debuted in October 1982), was based on Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot, and is about a clowder of cats who decide which of them will ascend to the “Heaviside Layer,” a metaphor for Heaven, and come back to live a new life.
The Tom Hooper film will be the first true Cats movie adaptation. Steven Spielberg’s Amblimation studio, which made An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, was set to do an adaptation. But that project was scrapped when the studio closed in 1997. A filmed version of the West End production of Cats was released in 1998, though that version had been re-edited to be much shorter than the actual musical.
Production on the Cats movie starts this fall.
