A Cats fan edit imagines what the infamous rumored Butthole Cut of the film would look like. For those that haven’t been following the slow-motion car crash that was Cats‘ trailers, release, and subsequent internet presence, you’ve missed a lot. Cats, adapted from the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, was one of the worst and weirdest movies in recent memory. It cleaned up at the 2019 Razzie Awards and the reviews for it were so bad that its marketing team was forced to tackle the controversy head-on in a Gotti-like approach that called out the movie’s critics.
Cats was a massive financial failure that has lived on in infamy on the internet. One of the biggest reasons for that enduring, mocking, buzz is the rumored existence of The Butthole Cut. Said rumor dates back to a Twitter exchange between TV writers Ben Mekler and Jack Waz that suggested the movie originally gave the cats CGI buttholes that were later removed and birthed the hashtag #ReleaseTheButtholeCut, a parody of the internet’s other enduring passion: Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Mekler has since made it his mission to verify the cut’s existence, something hindered by Universal’s refusal to comment on it.
But now, fans need not wonder any longer as YouTube channel XVPComedy has given life to the mythical butthole cut in an audacious and horrifying fan-edit of Cats‘ already nightmare-inducing footage. The edit stuffs the screen with buttholes in every frame and somehow manages to up the ante even further with Ian McKellen-cat-nipples and a giant luminous butthole in the sky in the edit’s closing moments. Take a look at The Butthole Cut, in all its glory, below:
Cats has become something of a cult hit and it’s easy to see why. The mind-boggling decisions made at just about every level coupled with the sheer insanity that is the original musical had this project destined for rowdy midnight screenings from the very beginning. It’s the kind of bizarro movie that director Tom Hooper has been threatening to make for a long time. After live-singing-Russel Crowe and all the weird visual touches in The King’s Speech, it feels like Cats was inevitable.
The sheer insanity that was Cats, from the dancing cockroaches and human-child-faced-mice to the creepily un-CGI’d human hands in the original release, was already enough to make the movie live on beyond its failed box office run but now The Butthole Cut has sent film’s legend up, up, up to the Heavyside Layer. Morbid curiosity about those buttholes will ensure that none of us, try as we might, will ever be able to forget about Cats.
