Cats Trailer #2 Features Fewer Songs & More Cat Jokes

Universal has released a brand-new trailer for the Cats musical movie. With Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker arriving on December 20, it’s easy to forget about the other titles releasing over the winter holidays this year. One of the largest question marks is the big screen adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s incredibly popular (and incredibly weird) stage musical, Cats. The film’s trailer dropped over the summer, but it didn’t exactly get the response one would expect to the movie version of one of the most successful Broadway shows of all time.

So far, the conversation around Cats has focused almost entirely on director Tom Hooper’s decision to use so-called digital fur technology to transform his cast into humanoid felines, to (arguably) terrifying results. The CGI isn’t simple either, which is why Cats will miss several awards deadlines as its moves to finish post-production in time for its release. Meanwhile, Universal is getting its marketing campaign up and going again this week.

The new Cats trailer dropped online this morning, ahead of its release in theaters this weekend. You can check it out in the space below.

Unlike the first trailer, the new Cats promo actually explains the film’s plot. The story, as was adapted for the screen by Hooper and his co-writer Lee Hall (Rocketman), revolves around a tribe of cats (known as the Jellicles) who, one night, must decide which of them should ascend to the Heaviside Layer and be reborn to a brand-new life. There’s not a whole lot to the narrative beyond this, so the new trailer more or less covers the basics of things. On top of that, the preview features fewer songs from the original musical and more in the way of cat-related puns and gags. Unsurprisingly, it appears as though James Corden and Rebel Wilson (both of whom are best-known for their musical and comedy work) will handle the bulk of the jokes in the Cats movie.

Needless to say, it will be interesting to see how critics and general audiences alike respond to the actual Cats movie. The film’s latest trailer does a better job than the first of not only selling the musical, but making it seem like the sort of all-ages appropriate offering that families can feel comfortable checking out over the winter holidays. Its human-cat hybrids continue to look fairly bizarre in motion, but they’re otherwise in keeping with the movie’s whimsical tone and style, judging by the marketing. Who knows: if the pieces all come together in the final film, then Cats might just prove to be inspiredly bonkers (or perhaps just bonkers) in its own right.