Steven Spielberg Dodged Biggest Career Flop by Passing on This Movie!

In 1990, Steven Spielberg’s company, Amblin, was looking to adapt the musical Cats, which features the Jellicle Cats, a tribe of cats that gathers once a year to choose one among them to ascend to the Jellicle heaven. Each cat must plead their case, leading to performances that touch on deep themes such as aging and death.

As Collider reminds us, Spielberg was excited about the project and wanted to set the story in early 1940s London and make it an animated film. By 1990, several animators were hired, including Michael Peraza Jr., Shelley Page, and Hans Bacher, known for their work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The direction was assigned to the duo Simon Wells and Phil Nibbelink, who had previously worked on The Great Mouse Detective and The Black Cauldron.

When Spielberg Decided to Take the Director’s Chair

Steven Spielberg aimed to transform Cats into a monumental work, enriching the characters and deviating from the original play. However, the script did not meet his expectations. In 1994, he decided to direct the film himself, aiming for a 1997 release. To refine the script, he enlisted Tom Stoppard, the screenwriter behind Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Empire of the Sun, and co-writer of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.

But by 1997, the project was still incomplete, and Amblin’s animation division, Amblimation, shut down. Most employees moved to DreamWorks, and Spielberg eventually dropped the film.

The Adaptation That Became a Mockery

A year later, a direct-to-video version of the musical was produced by David Mallet, a director known for his work on music videos and live performance recordings. It wasn’t until 2019 that Tom Hooper’s live-action film Cats was released in theaters.

This version faced a barrage of criticism: with a budget of $95 million, it only grossed $75.5 million worldwide. The concept of having well-known actors “dressed up” as cats was widely ridiculed. On AlloCiné, the press gave it an average rating of 2.1 out of 5, while audiences were even harsher, giving it just 1.5 out of 5 on average.

For the curious, the film is available on VOD.

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