Cats may be a cinematic crime for which there is no precedent—a surreal misfire, at once alienating, alarming, and delicious in a campy way, enflaming critics and moviegoers while simultaneously providing them with endless hours of cruel amusement.
As Hollywood prepares to select its best picture of the year at the Academy Awards, what will be the consequence for crafting arguably the biggest fiasco?
Cast members who donned the “digital fur,” like Taylor Swift and Jennifer Hudson, have tried to protect themselves by tiptoeing away from the ill-fated feline tale. But there’s no safe place for the maker of the film: Tom Hooper seems destined for “director’s jail.”
That’s the loosely defined term for what happens when the film industry loses faith in a once-trusted auteur, who must find a way to rehabilitate their damaged reputation or remain in exile forever. Fortunately, there’s always the potential for redemption. A do-over, a reboot—albeit with a much smaller budget and significantly greater oversight.
Executives at Universal Pictures, which is reportedly taking at least a $70 million loss on Cats, can be somewhat soothed by the fact that their other holiday release, Sam Mendes’s 1917, has become a box office juggernaut, tallying Golden Globe and Producers Guild victories that have established it as the Oscar front-runner.
Even insiders within Universal agree there are mitigating factors that might lead to Hooper’s early release from director’s jail. “This was a face-plant, no question,” one high-level source at the studio told Vanity Fair. “This sometimes happens with big swings. You take risks, and sometimes you get a Get Out, and sometimes you get a Cats. My guess is Tom Hooper will live to create another day, especially with the current demand for content.”
Hooper, who was also a producer and co-writer of Cats, was traveling and was unavailable for comment, but a source close to him said that the filmmaker hasn’t signed for his next project. His representatives at ICM have been fielding offers, however, and two of them are said to be particularly appealing—one a project in development at a major studio, another a project that has two stars attached.
“With filmmakers at Tom’s level, with the kind of body of work he has, there are so many of these guys who have had movies that haven’t connected financially, or critically, and it’s far from a defining moment,” the source said. “It ends up being part of the overall career.”
It helps when it’s a first offense, and the accused has a history of good behavior—like Hooper’s best-director Oscar for 2010’s The King’s Speech, which also won best picture.
“I don’t think anybody is going to be putting a $100 million budget in front of him now, but he’s still the director of The King’s Speech,” said veteran journalist Richard Rushfield, impresario of the Hollywood newsletter the Ankler and author of the definitive article “The Rules of Director Jail.”
The King’s Speech also earned a best-actor Oscar for Colin Firth. Hooper’s previous musical, 2012’s Les Misérables, was nominated for best picture and best actor (Hugh Jackman), and won best supporting actress for Anne Hathaway. Hooper’s 2015 drama, The Danish Girl, scored a best-actor nomination for Eddie Redmayne, while Alicia Vikander took home a statuette for supporting actress.
“If he can make a little $20 million movie and attract a few big stars to it who will say, ‘There’s still a chance I could win an Oscar here'—if he promises there won’t be any songs or special effects—he could get one shot,” Rushfield said. “He has enough of a past record that he could have that rather than lifetime imprisonment.”
Another factor that works on Hooper’s behalf is that he didn’t war with the studio. He didn’t vastly—or defiantly—overshoot his budget or schedule, either—apart from an awkward redistribution on opening weekend to correct a special effects flaw that left Judi Dench’s Old Deuteronomy character with a human hand.
Cats cost an estimated $95 million to make and has so far earned about $60 million globally. Underwhelming, for sure, but not a capital offense compared to other big-budget gambles.
“I have yet to find somebody in this town who has delivered a best picture and big box office who doesn’t get rehired—other than Michael Cimino. And that was because he shut a studio down,” said one source close to the Cats production.
The source was referring to the most notorious case of director’s jail, when the filmmaker behind The Deer Hunter, the Oscar-winning 1978 Vietnam film, was effectively banished from the business. His imprisonment came amid epic budget and scheduling conflicts over the 1980 Western Heaven’s Gate, which tanked at the box office and led the parent company of United Artists to sell off the studio to MGM. Cimino, who died in 2016, made sporadic small films over the next few decades but never returned to prominence.
The "director jail" phenomenon is also known to disproportionally punish women and people of color. In the 1990s and 2000s, diverse filmmakers who were finally making their breakthroughs also found themselves with few margin for error. Deep Impact's Mimi Leder and Girlfight's Karyn Kusama endured long dry spells in their careers after perceived disappointments that seemed discriminatory. Both came back strong, particularly last year with Leder's Ruth Bader Ginsburg drama On the Basis of Sex and Kusama's Nicole Kidman thriller Destroyer.
Directors such as Julie Dash and Ernest Dickerson have joined with fellow African-American filmmakers to speak out about how "directors' jail" was no joke to them, with industry skepticism and intolerance derailing promising early starts. "It's like they set us up to fail," director Darnell Martin told The New York Times last year.
Some recent headline-grabbing cases of "director jail" include two filmmakers who lost Star Wars films due to poor production and reception of other movies. Josh Trank, who denounced 2015’s Fantastic Four amid a public dispute with 20th Century Fox, was dropped months earlier from a planned Boba Fett movie by Lucasfilm. Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow was set to take the helm of Episode IX (known as The Rise of Skywalker) before his 2017 offbeat indie dramedy, The Book of Henry, opened to flabbergasted reviews. Officially, both left their Star Wars projects over creative differences.
Five years later, Trank is working on the Al Capone story Fonzo with Tom Hardy, and Trevorrow is returning to the land of dinosaurs with 2021’s Jurassic World 3.
The penalties are faster and harsher these days. “Director’s jail used to be if you had really screwed up,” said Rushfield. “If you were a ‘made man’ as a director, you had to have a lot of flops before people took notice. Everybody is on a one-mistake-and-you’re-out [policy] now because everything is such a big bet.”
The truly devastating thing about Cats, though, is not that people didn’t go to see it—it’s that it became an object of ridicule. The film has raised questions about Hooper’s judgment.
“If you fail at an action film, it’s like, who really cares?” Rushfield said. “Action movies are supposed to be silly and over the top. But when you’re in a grown-up drama and trying to be earnest, and doing something different—as they were here, trying for an Oscar—and it just seems so ill-conceived, it makes everyone say, ‘What were they thinking?’ It’s just embarrassing.”
One source close to Cats said Hooper’s biggest punishment may be losing access to top-tier projects: “It’ll be more or less, ‘Let’s find somebody else. Let’s see who else is available.’”
Hooper may also have to get used to compromising, overseeing films on which he has less creative control. “He can get hired, but is he going to come in the door with a passion project? I doubt it,” the source added.
Those inside Hooper’s circle say he will effectively try to play the hits, doing again what he has done well before, to remove the bad memory Cats has left behind. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted to do something that was more performance-driven, the way The King’s Speech or The Danish Girl were,” said the source close to the filmmaker. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s next. He always takes his time and thinks about it.”
— Vanity Fair’s 2020 Hollywood cover is here with Eddie Murphy, Renée Zellweger, Jennifer Lopez & more
— Who would defend Harvey Weinstein?
— Oscar nominations 2020: what went wrong—and did anything go right?
— Greta Gerwig on the lives of Little Women—and why “male violence” isn’t all that matters
— Jennifer Lopez on giving her all to Hustlers and breaking the mold
— How Antonio Banderas changed his life after nearly losing it
— From the Archive: A look at the J. Lo phenomenon
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hollywood newsletter and never miss a story.
