Andrew Lloyd Webber was so ap-paw-lled by the 'Cats' movie that he went out and got a dog

Tom Hooper's big screen adaptation of Cats apparently had a profound impact on the creator of the source material, Andrew Llyod Webber...just not in the way you'd expect. Like many audience members, the composer absolutely hated the 2019 film, which went on to win six Razzie Awards, including the not-so-coveted statue for Worst Picture. Lloyd Webber's distaste for the project was so great, in fact, that he was immediately converted into a dog person after watching it. 

"Cats was off-the-scale all wrong,” he recently said during a conversation with Variety. "There wasn’t really any understanding of why the music ticked at all. I saw it and I just thought, ‘Oh, God, no.’ It was the first time in my 70-odd years on this planet that I went out and bought a dog. So the one good thing to come out of it is my little Havanese puppy."

Lloyd Webber went on to joke that the psychological trauma caused by Cats requires him to have the dog at his side at all times. "The airline wrote back and said, ‘Can you prove that you really need him?’ And I said ‘Yes, just see what Hollywood did to my musical Cats.’ Then the approval came back with a note saying, ‘No doctor’s report required.’"

During an interview in the summer of 2020, the composer blamed the movie's ultimate failure on Hooper not wanting to involve any of the individuals who originally helped make the stage musical a success. "The whole thing was ridiculous," Lloyd Webber remarked at the time.

Just wait until he hears about the infamous "Butthole Cut."