Cats (lost unreleased cut of musical film; 2019)

This article has been tagged as NSFW due to its pornographic subject matter.

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A theatrical poster for the film.

Status: Lost

Cats is a 2019 live-action musical film adapted from the Broadway show of the same name. The film is infamous for its heavy use of CGI to transform the actors into uncanny valley human-cat hybrids, but even more infamous is the existence of a version of the film where the cats had anuses, dubbed the "butthole cut".

History

On March 17th, 2020, Twitter user @jackwaz posted a tweet where he claimed to be in touch with one of the VFX artists for the film and they shared a snippet of what work on the movie was like.

A VFX producer friend of a friend was hired in November to finish some of the 400 effects shots in @catsmovie. His entire job was to remove CGI buttholes that had been inserted a few months before. Which means that, somewhere out there, there exists a butthole cut of Cats.

This tweet gained even more attention after it was retweeted by Seth Rogen, who was live-tweeting a watch through of the film around this time. Rogen tweeted out "Release the butthole cut!", which gained over 5,000 retweets and 46,000 likes along with famed directors like Rian Johnson getting in on the joke.

Existence

On March 19th, 2020, author Yohana Desta of Vanity Fair published an article called "We Spent 24 Hours Searching for the Elusive “Butthole Cut” of Cats", in which she goes into detail about her research into the legitimacy of this version of the film. Reaching out to Jack Waz, he mentions having gotten the information from the friend around New Year's, with said friend refusing to comment in the article. Spokespeople for both Universal and Film Mill were contacted as well, both stating they couldn't comment on the cut's existence due to NDAs they'd signed.

The day before on the 18th, however, Twitter user Ben Mekler posted a tweet showing a screenshot of an email sent to them by a VFX artist on Cats that wished to stay anonymous. The email read as follows:

There were never shots of cats with butt holes. Or at least by design, None that I saw anyway. However, there were a dozen or so shots where the skin and fur sim was groomed or just folded in a way that really REALLY looked like very furry lady genitals and buttholes by accident. The task (as typical with heavy cg shows) fell on 2D to paint out the offending articles where it was brought up and spotted. Daily reviews were constant awkward discussions of people plucking up the courage to point things like this out; 'does that like a fanny to you?'

Despite this, demand for the original version of the footage was still strong, with some people believing this was merely a coverup story. Robbie Fairchild, the actor for Munkustrap in the film, claims to have seen this cut of the movie. In an interview with PageSix, he stated: “It was my favorite thing in the world. They gave me eight nipples. They were like radioactive pink.”