Box office Cats grossed $27.2 million in the United States and Canada, and $47.4 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $74.6 million against a production budget of about $95 million. In the United States and Canada,
Cats was initially projected to gross $15–20 million in its opening weekend. Universal hoped that the film would
appeal to young women as
counterprogramming against
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, and emphasised Swift in marketing. After making $2.6 million on its opening day (including $550,000 from Thursday night previews), estimates for
Cats were lowered to $7 million. Ultimately, the film only debuted to $6.5 million, finishing fourth at the box office. The poor performance was attributed to negative reception of the trailers, poor reviews and competition from
The Rise of Skywalker. In its second weekend,
Cats made $4.8 million (for a total of $8.7 million over the five-day Christmas period), finishing in eighth place. It then made $2.6 million in its third weekend, finishing tenth.
Critical response The
review aggregator website
Rotten Tomatoes reported that 19% of critics gave the film a positive review based on 334 reviews, with an
average rating of . The site's critics consensus reads: "Despite its fur-midable cast, this
Cats adaptation is a clawful mistake that will leave most viewers begging to be put out of their mew-sery." On review aggregator
Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 32 out of 100 based on 51 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews. Audiences polled by
CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C+" on an A+ to F scale, while those at
PostTrak gave it an average 0.5 out of 5 stars, with 30% saying they would definitely recommend it. though many in the furry fandom also found the effects disturbing. David Rooney of
The Hollywood Reporter felt that the film was "hobbled by a major misjudgment in its central visual concept", lamenting its execution (such as the poor proportions of the "cats" to their environments) and deeming the film "exhausting".
Peter Travers of
Rolling Stone rated the film zero stars out of five, stating it was "bizarre", had terrible special effects, and made the audience "want to cry for mercy", while Hooper "traps the actors in an airless, lifeless bubble of a film that scarcely gives them room to breathe, much less develop a character". In the
Los Angeles Times,
Justin Chang wrote: "With its grotesque design choices and busy, metronomic editing,
Cats is as uneasy on the eyes as a Hollywood spectacle can be, tumbling into an
uncanny valley between mangy realism and dystopian artifice." Debruge said that the film should have used "face paint and Lycra" like the musical. Simran Hans of
The Observer agreed that "many of its uncanny images are sure to haunt viewers for generations". Her one-star review described the film as "a clear career low" for most of the actors, wondering whether they "are aware of what they've gotten themselves into".
Peter Bradshaw for
The Guardian agreed with the one-star rating. In a review parodying "
The Naming of Cats", he criticised the visual style and particularly the character design, while lambasting the film as a "dreadful hairball of woe".
Manohla Dargis of
The New York Times felt that Hooper had made "a robust effort" to adapt the stage musical—which "was always going to be difficult, particularly once the decision was made to create a live-action version rather than an animated one"—and "enlisted some talented performers", but that the film version suffered from a lack of the human connection that theatre involves, where performers and audience share a space, without which "all that's left are canned images of fit-looking people meowing and raising their rumps high in the air".
The Hollywood Reporter named
Cats one of the ten worst films of 2019, Travers said it "easily scores as the bottom of the 2019 barrel—and arguably of the decade", and Adam Graham of
The Detroit News said "
Cats is the biggest disaster of the decade, and possibly thus far in the millennium. It's
Battlefield Earth with whiskers." Alex Cranz of
io9 warned: "I have seen sights no human should see" but said others "must witness" Hooper's, the actors', and Hollywood's hubris, citing a human being appearing in a group of cats, a cat-coloured woman without fur, and other examples of how "the shit's just
not finished."
Ty Burr of
The Boston Globes half-star review said "there are moments in
Cats I would gladly pay to unsee" and warned small children to not watch the film. He reported that the preview audience laughed like the reaction to
Springtime for Hitler during Dench's "The Ad-dressing of Cats", because each pause in her lyrics seemed to be the end of the film ("at long last") before continuing. Patrick Gibbs of
SLUG said: "There is not enough kitty litter in the world to cover up this mess." Pete Hammond of
Deadline complimented Taylor Swift's performance as Bombalurina and her signature "Macavity" number, as well as "Beautiful Ghosts", which she wrote along with Lloyd Webber. Patrick Ryan of
USA Today stated that Swift "makes the most of her brief screen time, bringing her unabating charisma to the flirtatious feline ... if there's one thing that's disappointing about Swift's performance, it's that there isn't more of it". Hans said that she was the only actor "who seems to be having fun, perhaps because she only appears in the film for approximately 10 minutes." Jennifer Hudson similarly received praise for her rendition of "Memory", with some critics describing it as "the best part" of the film and "the sole musical number in the new movie that summons real feeling".
Ricky Gervais, while hosting the 2020
Golden Globe Awards, said, "This is the worst thing that has happened to cats since dogs." Lloyd Webber was critical of the film, calling it "ridiculous" in an interview with
The Sunday Times, saying: "The problem with the film was that Tom Hooper decided that he didn't want anybody involved in it who was involved in the original show." He later revealed in an interview with
The Daily Telegraph: "I wrote to the head of Universal and said, 'You've got a car crash on your hands unless you get a grip on this thing', a year before they made (it). I didn't even get a reply." In a 2021 interview with
Variety, Lloyd Webber claimed his negative reaction to the film had even directly inspired him to adopt a
Havanese dog. In a 2024 interview with the
Kingdom of Dreams podcast,
Simon Wells, who was previously set to direct the animated film adaptation for Amblimation, said that the live action version had "a lot of things about it that are not good. Other people took it on and they didn't really fare much better". A. S. Hamrah of
The New York Review of Books wrote in 2025 that "Universal ... didn’t know that they had produced the worst film of the year, maybe the worst of the decade, maybe the worst ever". The studio provided an
open bar for critics after the New York
preview screening but, he recalled, they were so appalled that no one went to it: "Writers turning down free drinks. Another ominous sign for the new year".
Accolades On 26 December 2019, it was reported that Universal had removed
Cats from its
For Your Consideration web page. The film was not available on the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' private
streaming media platform for award contenders. == See also ==