“So it’s Been Out Since October”: Film Fans Shocked To Learn Hyped 2023 Movie Has Been On Streaming For Free

Cat Person is available to stream online for free from a surprising website, and film fans are shocked. Directed by Susanna Fogel, the movie is based on a popular short story of the same name by Kristen Roupenian from 2017, which itself is loosely inspired by real events. Cat Person had its premiere at Sundance in January of this year, telling a story about college sophomore Margot (Emilia Jones), who discovers the true horrors of modern dating after a romantic encounter with Robert (Nicholas Braun), an older man.

Now, @ElBlackPhillipp on X, formerly known as Twitter, reveals that Cat Person has actually been available to stream for free on Hoopla for some time. Hoopla makes movies, books, comics, and more free to anyone with a library card.

The user includes info from entertainment journalist Matthew Belloni’s Puck News newsletter, What I’m Hearing…, revealing that Netflix offered to buy the film for $5 million, but StudioCanal refused due to its desire for a theatrical release. The film, which is budgeted at $12 million, was ultimately sold to Rialto Pictures and got a theatrical release in October, making only $338,541. Check out select reactions to the news below:

“They fumbled it badly,” writes M. “Whole thing with the short story was the discussions and reactions it caused,” he continues, before pointing out that allowing the film to go to Netflix could have allowed for these types of discussions to take place.

@kellyanchovies points out that the theatrical release for Cat Person wasn’t marketed effectively, writing: “lmao why didn’t they tell anyone about the theatrical release they wanted so bad“.

“The real Cat Person guy smiling and nodding like the ghosts at end of Return of the Jedi,” jokes Jingleghost.

Speaking to the mixed reaction the film has received thus far, Ryan Chang writes: “gonna support my local library by hate watching Cat Person.”

“WOW I had NO idea this was ever released,” writes machine gun kelly reichardt, another nod to the film’s lack of effective marketing.

Graham 2: Cruise Control jokes that Cat Person‘s failure in theaters is “bad news for a potential bean dad movie, or other films based on things people cared about on here for a week.”

“‘Zero people watch it or are aware that it happened’ is a top 5 outcome for getting your writing adapted tbh,” mocks Malcolm Harris.

Related

How Cat Person Found A Dramatic Horror/Thriller In A Short Story

Cat Person director Susanna Fogel and author Kristen Roupenian discuss the challenges and intentions behind adapting the source material.

How Was Cat Person Received?

As was alluded to in one of the above tweets, Cat Person probably would have been an exciting Netflix release because it generated some debate at Sundance. Cat Person‘s reviews were mostly negative (the film’s Rotten Tomatoes score currently sits at 45%), but it takes some big narrative swings and has a few surprising left turns, which may have resulted in some lively discourse had more people actually been able to watch it.

Clarisse Loughrey of The Independent calls the movie an “embarassing cinematic blunder“, pointing out that it loses much of what made the original short story so interesting. Wendy Ide of The Guardian takes issue with the film’s third act, which she calls a “lurid, messily violent generic climax.” While not all the reviews are so negative, the consensus seems to be that Cat Person‘s big swings don’t pay off and that it trades some of the complexity of the short story for more traditional genre filmmaking.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to guage how audiences have received Cat Person so far because so few people actually got a chance to see it. The film’s audience score on Rotten Tomatoes sits at 53% as of this writing, but with fewer than 50 ratings, this isn’t really a metric that has much value. Perhaps, now that the film is available to stream for free on Hoopla, more viewers will actually get to check it out and share their opinions.