Jennifer Hudson, Taylor Swift, James Corden and Ian McKellen are set to star in Working Title and Universal’s movie version of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s smash musical Cats, I can confirm. Quite the cast.
Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) will direct the film, which has been adapted by Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) from Webber’s musical. Hooper has been prepping the project for two years and it is set to shoot in the UK this fall. Additional casting is under way.
Universal, Working Title and Hooper hit it out of the park with Oscar-winner Les Miserables and many will expect similar results from Cats. The stage version is the fourth-longest-running show in Broadway history and the sixth-longest-running in London’s West End.
The play follows a tribe of cats called the Jellicles over the course of one night as they decide which of their group will ascend to the ‘Heaviside Layer’ and come back to a new life. Oscar-winner Hudson is in line to play Grizabella, the former ‘Glamour Cat’, while I understand McKellen will play the lovable patriarch Old Deuteronomy. Swift’s last big-screen acting role was in 2014 feature The Giver. Brit tabloid The Daily Mail first reported the castings.
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