Since it bowed on Thursday, the internet has taken great delight in dunking on the Cats trailer. The first look at the film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s beloved (by some) musical has been a goldmine, inspiring jokes, memes, as well as more ambitious tomfoolery. One person — who had already gone semi-viral by replacing the soundtrack with the trailer for It Chapter Two — went above and beyond, Photoshopping Nick Offerman’s face on as many of the characters as he could fit in a single image.
Cats (2019) but every character is played by @Nick_Offerman pic.twitter.com/jXsptnSSqA
— Joaquín Baldwin (moved to 🦋 bluesky) (@joabaldwin) July 20, 2019
Who else thought replacing every actor in Cats with Nick Offerman was a good idea? Nick Offerman.
Let’s do this 🐈🕺🏻 https://t.co/W9uS1MKt3d
— Nick Offerman (@Nick_Offerman) July 20, 2019
“Let’s do this,” he wrote while sharing the post. And who knows, maybe they will. When the trailer for the Sonic the Hedgehog movie dropped a few months ago, the response to the lead character design was so vitriolic that the filmmakers pushed back the release date a bit so they could retool the CGI.
Surely Universal and director Tom Hooper — who won an Oscar for The King’s Speech and also brought us the Les Misérables movie — have noticed that their trailer has gotten even worse notice, with people mocking the character designs, the make-up, the sets, the shot of a tiny cat at a dinner table. And perhaps they, too, will rework their film.
They do have a while; Cats isn’t set for release until the winter, when it will open against no less than the next Star Wars. Maybe they, too, will think it’s a good idea to replace Oscar-winners Jennifer Hudson, Dame Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, plus James Corden with Ron Swanson. We know Offerman can sing, but he can also play a mean sax.