Cats: It’s about cats, singing cats! You’ll love it. After melting down the internet by revealing the uncomfortably realistic anatomy of this movie’s Jellicle Cats in the first trailer for Cats back in July, Universal has returned today to grace us with another trailer for Cats. This one, which you can watch above, has a bunch of dialogue (which doesn’t happen onstage), including Judi Dench’s Old Deuteronomy explaining the buck-wild premise of the musical Cats: that the cats are all gathering to decide which one of them will be reborn into a new life. “I judge a cat by its soul,†she says.
Sadly, this new trailer doesn’t deploy “Beautiful Ghosts,†the song Taylor Swift and Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote for the movie, but it does include a moment where Cat Taylor shimmies, and one where a somehow still sexy Idris Elba growls “going to the ball … could get dangerous.†Obviously! Nothing could be more dangerous than having Judi Dench judge your soul.
The first trailer for Cats, above, came out after a dead-serious behind-the-scenes featurette that promised that all the A-listers in the movie would be turned into cats via “digital fur technology†and that they’re surrounded by gigantic furniture to make them look cat size. Anyway, the movie stars Taylor Swift as Bombalurina, Idris Elba as Macavity, Judi Dench as Old Deuteronomy, James Corden as Bustopher Jones, Rebel Wilson as Jennyanydots, Jason Derulo as Rum Tum Tugger, Ian McKellen as Gus the Theatre Cat, and of course Jennifer Hudson as Grizabella, a.k.a. the one who gets to belt “Memory.†The ballet dancer Francesca Hayward plays Victoria the White Cat, who has apparently become the movie’s central character.
Cats is based on T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the story of a group of cats that gather to sing about themselves and then decide who gets reincarnated. In keeping with the musical version, everything is weirdly sexual. Cats premieres December 20 this year.