Cats Fans Are Clamoring About the ‘Butthole Cut.’ Does It Actually Exist?

Poor Gus. Photo: Universal Pictures

Late Tuesday night, the world got its first piece of good news in a long time.

The inciting incident, as with so much else in recent history, was Tom Hooper’s Cats. With the film becoming available on digital download this week, quarantined viewers who had missed out on all the fun during its theatrical run finally got a chance to acquaint themselves with the likes of the Rum Tum Tugger, Magical Mister Mistoffelees, and Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat, the cat of the railway train. As Seth Rogen’s livetweets indicated, they were as mystified and entranced as everyone else — perhaps more so, given the mental strain these viewers were now under. Joining Rogen in tweeting though the movie was filmmaker Ben Mekler, who posted about his need for “a tell-all book about the making of CATS.� In response, writer Jack Waz stepped in with a report of a disturbingly plausible alternate reality. Somewhere out there, he said, there existed a cut of the film that was potentially even more terrifying than the version that made it to theaters.

It was a version of the film where all the cats had realistic CGI buttholes.

Of course, the “friend of a friend who works in VFX� is second only to “uncle who works at Nintendo� as a source of rumors you absolutely should not believe. And yet, the notion of these musical felines attending the Jellicle Ball with anatomically correct anuses soon became, in the parlance of our industry, too good to check. It’s understandable: The lack of realistic buttholes in Cats was the movie’s rare act of restraint. For the filmmakers to have spent untold amounts of time and energy including them — and then similar amounts excluding them — would have been a level of chutzpah-laden folly on par with the Fyre Festival. Please God, make it be true!

By the morning of March 18, with the assistance of director Rian Johnson, #ReleaseTheButtholeCut began trending. If this was digital misinformation, well, at least it was harmless, especially compared to what else is out there right now.

But … could the Butthole Cut actually exist? Vulture reached out to Waz with no response, so more information from the “friend of a friend� seems to be unforthcoming. An attempt to clarify the situation by contacting Universal raised more questions than it answered. When asked to confirm or deny the report, the studio simply issued a “no comment.� Intriguing!

Things might have stayed there, with the butthole cut remaining a tantalizing urban legend. But hours into the saga, Mekler returned with an update that shined some much-needed light into an area where the sun don’t shine. According to an anonymous source who claimed to have worked on the film, while Waz’s friend may have exaggerated about the amount of feline buttholes in a prior cut of the film, there was nevertheless a streak of truth to the report:

There were never any shots of cats with butt holes. Or at least by design. None that I saw anyway. However, there were a dozen or so shots where the skin and fur sim was groomed or just folded in a way that really REALLY looked like very furry lady genitals and buttholes by accident. The task (as typical with heavy cg shows) fell on 2D to paint out the offending articles where it was brought up and spotted. Daily reviews were constant awkward discussions of people plucking up the courage to point things like this out; “does that look like a fanny [British slang for ‘vagina’] to you?�

That seems to square things away nicely — while post-production on Cats did not include an actual butthole cut, it did include lots of VFX artists having to Photoshop out things that accidentally looked like buttholes and genitalia. And then after all that, they got made fun of at the Oscars, too. God, those people deserve hazard pay.