Truly, the national coronavirus lockdown is probing the American psyche in some unusual directions at this point. How else would Tuesday night have ended with #releasethebuttholecut trending on Twitter?
The film they’re referring to is of course Cats—the now infamous abomination of CGI fur and bolted-on celebrity faces that sent the entire internet into a frothing panic when it was released in December of 2019. Since then, Cats has racked up Razzie Awards and all the expected detritus, but it also continues to draw lots and lots of curiosity from film writers and cinema geeks. Mostly, people just want to know how the madness of Cats could possibly have been allowed to happen, and that includes writer-director Ben Mekler, who tweeted his desire for a tell-all Cats book last night.
I desperately need a tell-all book about the making of CATS. It could really help me get through this
— ben mekler (@benmekler) March 18, 2020
What Mekler almost certainly WASN’T expecting was the following response tweet from TV writer Jack Waz, who dropped a bombshell of utterly gross proportions: The version of Cats we’ve all seen could have been so much weirder. In fact, it could have been filled with cat buttholes from top to bottom, like that episode of Bob’s Burgers where Gayle paints a bunch of animal butts, if not for the work of a VFX artist who removed somewhere around 400 buttholes from Cats just before the film’s release.
Waz goes on to refer to finding this “butthole cut” of the film as his “white whale.”
Finding this cut is my white whale #ReleaseTheButtholeCut
— Jack Waz (@jackwaz) March 18, 2020
Almost immediately, Twitter was off to the races. A version of Cats, made all the more demented by showing off the feature your own cat insists on sticking in your face? Who’s got time to be hunting for the Snyder Cut of Justice League when there might still be a version of Cats out there with hundreds of buttholes?
The #releasethebuttholecut movement immediately attracted A-list backers, including the likes of Rian Johnson and Seth Rogen.
#ReleaseTheButtholeCut is exactly what we all need right now https://t.co/BhaROTRqLM
— Rian Johnson (@rianjohnson) March 18, 2020
In case you need this repeated, that’s the director of The Last Jedi and Knives Out, enthusiastically requesting to see hundreds of cat buttholes. One can only imagine what our internet discourse is going to be like a month from now, when we’ve all grown long beards and claw-like fingernails.