The Internet Is Demanding To See The Version of ‘Cats’ Where They All Have Buttholes

Listen, if there’s one thing that we can cling onto in our troubled, confusing times, it’s that the movie Cats will never get less brain-meltingly baffling.

The Tom Hooper-directed ‘prestige’ musical ultimately turned out to be one of the most horrifying fever dreams of modern cinema. Shipped to cinemas legitimately unfinished, filled with gargantuan CGI beasties, and singularly ugly from beginning to end, the film will live out the rest of human history as a work of great infamy.

But hey, at least it continues to surprise us in new ways. See, over the past two days, rumours have swirled that Cats was once filled with feline buttholes.

It all kicked off on March 18, when a Twitter user by the name of Jack Waz revealed that his friend worked on the VFX side of Cats, and was part of a CGI team that was hired to paint out the buttholes that each of the characters in the film was initially given.

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

— Jack Waz (@jackwaz) March 18, 2020

Tantalisingly, Waz suggested that there might be a ‘butthole’ cut of the film out there; i.e. one with the feline anuses still attached.

And so, with the speed and enthusiasm that occurs when most of us are trapped in quarantine, the internet started demanding that film.

The clamouring for the butthole cut had begun.

Someone's gonna come out of the woodwork claiming to have actually SEEN the Butthole Cut of CATS and everything's so insane right now we're gonna have no choice but to believe them.

— Scott Wampler™ (@ScottWamplerBMD) March 18, 2020

Our own hubris will always be the greatest fuel for our destruction.https://t.co/SaScEOvIkp

— Fourvel (@Johnny_MNU) March 18, 2020

#ReleaseTheButtholeCut is exactly what we all need right now https://t.co/BhaROTRqLM

— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) March 18, 2020

But almost as quickly as it came to life, the ‘butthole cut’ died a sudden death. A VFX artist who worked on the film got in touch with Ben Mekler, the comedian, writer and Twitter user whose innocent tweet about the film kicked off the whole story, and clarified the rumour.

URGENT #ReleaseTheButtholeCut update/clarification, emailed to me by a CATS VFX crewmember who has asked to remain anonymous pic.twitter.com/nmta9CG08E

— ben mekler (@benmekler) March 18, 2020

“There were never shots of cats with buttholes,” the artist wrote. “Or at least by design.

“However, there were a dozen or so shots where the skin and fur … was just folded in a way that really, really looked like very furry lady genitals and buttholes by accident. The task … fell on 2D to paint out the offending articles where it was brought up and spotted.”

So no, technically there isn’t a ‘butthole cut’. But there is a version of the film with accidental buttholes. And that might be just as good.