This Friday, we’re going to get the answers to a question we’ve been asking for a long time: what the hell is the Cats movie actually going to be? The trailer is dropping at the end of the week to give us a proper look at whatever’s been cooked up – and in the meantime, a pre-trailer featurette called ‘A Look Inside’ is here to remind you of that bonkers cast and reveal a chunk of behind the scenes footage. It’s effectively a sizzle reel, with the likes of Taylor Swift and Idris Elba hyping up the scope and ambition on display, and a heavy focus on the dance element of the film.
So there we have it – no actual cats yet, but more word on the technology that will render digital fur onto some of the most famous faces into the world. And it turns out those reports were correct about the huge physical sets with massively scaled-up furniture to give a cats-eye view of the world. Perhaps most intriguingly, this early look seems to position Cats as a dance film as much as a musical – yes, there are songs aplenty, but the show itself is plotted both loosely and oddly. It seems visual pizzazz will be more of a draw here than the twists and turns of the Jellicle Cats and their plight.
Either way, we’ll get more of a sense of the vision of the film – which, let we forget, stars Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, James Corden, Rebel Wilson, Jason Derulo, and Jennifer Hudson along the aforementioned Swift and Elba, and is directed by Tom Hooper – when the trailer arrives on Friday.