Scratch that: Cats film to be 'resupplied' with 'improved visuals' | Hacker News Reader

Scratch that: Cats film to be 'resupplied' with 'improved visuals'

theguardian.com

97 pointscpeterso188 comments

This could end up being a really interesting precedent in film (not in a way I like, personally). akersten writes farther down:

> We're going to wind up in some terrible place where if you pre-order your movie ticket you can see the Target special edition of Avengers Endgame 8 that is only available in theaters for two weeks before it switches to some other version. Maybe we'll get to the point where movie theaters will just perpetually have the same film on roll and update it every couple of months with the latest patches like an MMO. Remember, your Avengers and Superman subscriptions are different.

Not sure about the last one, but you could imagine lots of possibilities:

- Regional versions of films with anything from chunks of dialog ("I'm from X") up through entire cityscape backgrounds changed depending on the theater location. With CG, even things like character appearance (e.g. race) could be regional.

- Brand placement: Top sponsor's products appear in the first two weeks of showings, then second bidder for the next two weeks, etc.

- A/B testing different versions of films with live audiences and tweaking.

- The opposite of what akersten said: introduce new little easter eggs or features regularly over the course of the film's theater run to encourage repeat ticket buying from the hardcore fans.

What else?

I doubt people could.be convinced to do repeat (say monthly) viewings of a movie.

It could spectacularly backfire when the audience say "let's wait until they release version 3 in a few months, after they've patched up the shitty parts the beta viewers didn't like.".

Yesterday I saw the headline that in Singapore, a lesbian kiss was deleted from the Skywalker movie, so a version of your idea exists.

It's completely normal for feature films to have cuts for different regions to handle censorship preferences. Consider Leon (released as "The Professional" in the US). Mainland Europe isn't as up tight about the idea that teenage girls crush on older men and so the edit released there includes scenes the US wasn't comfortable with and as a result fleshes out the middle of the film. Unlike that lesbian kiss we're taking about several whole scenes with dialogue which were shot but aren't in the US movie at all. And that's normal.

What's special about Cats is that they changed the movie after it "shipped". This is a watershed like when video games started getting day one patches. Super Mario Brothers had no day one patch, it was a physical hunk of metal and plastic, when we played Outer Worlds we set apart an hour the day before for the patches to apply, knowing there would be patches because all games do that now.

Leon the Professional was available in North America with the BluRay re-release if not before. If I hadn’t sold The Professional I could have shown it to the kids several years earlier. As it is the cringe factor they experienced means I may have still miscalculated.

That film cemented Gary Oldman as my favorite actor for that decade. It’s also just a really good action film. And I was bummed when Danny Aiello passed and hardly anyone mentioned Old Tony.

The writers of Clue did three endings. If you’ve played the game that’s the perfect place to try that sort of trick, but I think they chickened out and didn’t do it. It’s now standard to include them as a sequence at the end.

AFAIK they did indeed show three different endings depending on the theatre you saw it at for the theatrical release.

They did do it for the original theatrical release. Movie listings published in the newspapers specified whether each showing was ending ‘A’, ‘B’, or ‘C’, so if you wished you could attend multiple times and ensure you saw a different ending each time.

First time I watched kingsmen was on a Qatar airlines flight. There were a lot of cuts - the church scene was about 20 seconds long for example.

> - Regional versions of films with anything from chunks of dialog ("I'm from X") up through entire cityscape backgrounds changed depending on the theater location. With CG, even things like character appearance (e.g. race) could be regional.

This already happens. Pixar movies for example do this, Inside Out for example used different region-specific foods that kids didn't like for that memory in the movie. Movies released in China and the US often are cut differently where in China the Chinese actor or actress is given more prominence in the plot.

Movies have different cuts for different regions to pass different censorship ratings the currently running star wars movies has a few scenes cut to get PG13 rating in Singapore.

Just FYI: That’s a single 1-second scene of a lesbian kiss (during celebrations at the end of the movie) with two nameless characters that don’t matter in the movie.

Yeah but it is a different edit wolf of wall street had bigger edits

This is rarely done well. In Inside Out UK edition, the dad daydreams by thinking about a football (soccer) match, presumably because this is a stereotypical Dad Thing "translated" to British. However, it is a major plot point that the dad (and whole family) are obsessed with ice hockey so this makes no sense. He never mentions or thinks about soccer again. Similarly Captain America's personal list of pop culture stuff is replaced with a local version, which makes no sense for the embodiment of USA.

There is an interesting bit in Le Ton Beau de Marot about the French translation of Gödel Escher Bach where Hofstadter says he instructed the French translation team to feel free to "culturally translate" analogies and examples etc, but is horrified when they translate a personal anecdote about attending an American football game in Ann Arbor into a rugby match.

Never been a fan of localisations, this idea that audiences can’t understand things outside their culture seems a pretty low view to have of your audience and the changes that the localisers add just tend to add confusion rather than clarity.

Like how in 90s videogames localisers thought they were being smart renaming items from Rice Ball to Hamburger. Usually without changing the sprites.

I’d prefer it if the initial ideas and setting of the story were kept in tact and just translated rather than someone trying to be smart about it and failing.

> Never been a fan of localisations, this idea that audiences can’t understand things outside their culture seems a pretty low view to have of your audience

Did you hear how many changes they had to Harry Potter to make it understandable to an American audience? And that's the same language even!

Were there any changes beyond turning "the Philosopher's Stone" into "the Sorcerer's Stone"? I recall 12 year-old me routinely glossing blithely over Britishisms like "dustbin", or what felt like 90% of what was served in the cafeteria.

Quite a few, yes, but having to change the title is pretty drastic!

https://www.hp-lexicon.org/2001/08/25/differences-between-br...

Those aren't localizations, those are translations. Changing trainers to sneakers is different than changing broccoli to a different vegetable.

How is philosopher’s stone to sorcerer’s stone a translation? What is a sorcerer’s stone in America? And how is adding a whole extra character a translation?

That change wasn’t even because they didn’t think American kids would understand it. It was because they had a low opinion of the readership and thought nobody would read a book with “philosopher” in the title.

... because "philosopher's stone" isn't well known in USA and "philosopher" means something different.

Perhaps because USAns don't have as much interest in pseudoscience as British ;-)

The people who used to search for the philosopher’s stone are common ancestors of both our cultures. If you aren’t aware of it it’s because you’ve stopped reading history, not because it’s some new idea of ours.

> This could end up being a really interesting precedent in film

The problem is that this doesn’t play out well at all and isn’t sustainable for the production houses actually working on the film. VFX work on a film can finish months, and few weeks, of days before a release date. As soon as that deadline is hit, workers either: go on break, get reallocated to another show, or leave as their contract is up (non-contract artists are very few in this industry). Having to pull people that worked on a show back to fixes after being put on a new one, or they may be completely gone, will only damage the show they are currently working on.

It’s not a practice that is sustainable, and with the pretty thin margins of VFX right now isn’t something that is as simple to solve as keep people around or hire more. And most studios can’t follow MPC/Technicolor’s philosophy of throwing as many junior bodies at the task.

They won't reshoot or re-do the work. They will simply make 3-5 versions of it, the modern day DLC, before it ever hits the theaters. Then release versions of it over time.

I think you're discounting the possibility that this can be (at least partially) automated. Specifically things like changing sponsor logos or animation models. I can envision tools that allow a sign in a store front to change from "Coke" to "Pepsi" automatically, or even replace that Audi car the hero is driving to a Mercedes.

Of course, not everything could be automated but I think a good portion of it could be. The original VFX team would just have to insert "markers" into the workflow which could then be replaced and re-rendered. Almost like changing build flags and recompiling a program.

In fact this already already happens, currently it's used the ads industry for luxury car segment where they render individual ad reels for any car configuration you order.

The other day someone sent me this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLg5CZ-AG0g&feature=emb_titl...

This shows a product that apparently can scan a video for good places to put ads, and then replace or insert advertisements into it. And by "insert" I mean "add branded cups on the table where none existed" or "add a billboard to the cityscape where none existed". Scary stuff, I absolutely hate that people are working on such things.

> I can envision tools that allow a sign in a store front to change from "Coke" to "Pepsi" automatically, or even replace that Audi car the hero is driving to a Mercedes. Product visualization/ads has had pipelines set up for this near drag and drop for static assets for a while now. Their assets are known before production, and have been decided by the agency that made them. Animation and Film VFX are setup fairly differently.

The ability to make changes like that already exist. Scenes and assets built procedurally can be altered with relative ease as long as they don’t encroach on other aspects of the shot.

> Specifically things like changing sponsor logos or animation models.

Logos and for the most part basic comp-only changes? Yeah that’s fine. Animation model is a completely different story. Changing the base model means the UV’s likely changed so the texture artists will have to either update (can be complex if they’re trying to maintain their original stack) or redo their work. It means the rig needs to be updated and modified. If it’s a muscle based system for precise and realistic skin deformation, have fun. If there character has fur, then the grooming team has to do another take on the asset as well. Animation then needs to make another pass on their scenes to make sure the animation actually looks good and lookdev needs to make tweaks to maintain the look they had before. And then you have to rerender, which will likely conflict with the rendering allocations (if using an on-prem farm) of the current deliverable unless the studio is in a lull point. And rendering takes time. Then comp gets to deal with the change and make sure it still sits in the shot. And we still haven’t discussed the time and tweaks to re-sim and cache any affected effects.

For a movie like Cats, this is going to be a lot of work, with a ton of anim, matchmove, and comp fixes.

> The original VFX team would just have to insert "markers" into the workflow which could then be replaced and re-rendered. Almost like changing build flags and recompiling a program.

That is a significant misrepresentation/and lack of understanding of how these pipelines work and function. No matter how much you can automate, this is not just data the way the typical HN user sees things. This is someone’s art and vision, and will always require a hands on approach with human eyes. If it was as simple as changing a few parameters or altering a few lines of code, there would be far fewer people in the industry.

> I can envision tools that allow a sign in a store front to change from "Coke" to "Pepsi" automatically.

This was literally the project I worked on this summer, as an application of GANs for "image translation". We basically trained some of the latest GAN models on our dataset of Pepsi and Coke bottles. Thankfully, all the research papers are accompanied by complete tensorflow/pytorch implementations so we only had to do minor modifications to train/test them on our dataset. The results were mixed, it worked pretty well for bottles on white backgrounds, and one network properly learnt the importance of orientation of the logo (horizontally flipped images generated corresponding flipped target logos). The field is pretty nascent, and from the papers I've read, NVIDIA Research seems to be making good progress on this. I believe in two or three years, we can definitely see this tech in production.

They can just switch from waterfall to agile and build integrated production pipeline to reduce time to market for renders. If multi-release cycle will make sense economically it will be reflected in planning, so that situation you describe simply won’t happen.

I was (until earlier this year) on a dev team at a VFX house trying to implement a more agile production management system. The project ultimately failed, in large part because none of the show managers wanted to change how they do things. Therefore we could never test and validate the approach and therefore could not finish the product.

In 15 years, deepfake stars based on audience metrics will be all the rage. Even actors that don't primarily work in deepfake will usually have clauses in their contract which allow deepfaking them post-filming to make adjustments.

Interesting thought. How about this scenario: deepfake the audience into background character roles. As training times go down you could see this happening on demand at theaters after you buy your ticket.

Production houses (and the people that work at them) will do what they are paid to do.

If they are paid to provide "tail" work to adjust "released" movies they'll take money and happily do it. If the money is there, they'll adjust resource allocation as needed.

(The interesting thing here is what "released" means now -- that seems to be a soft concept now.)

How about the approach MMORPGs take, where there’s a “dev team” that makes the base game, and then a separately-built (perhaps even a separate studio!) “live team” that builds new content for the game, with access to the raw assets from the original dev team but no access to the original dev-team themselves.

There are solutions from the continuous march of technology making this all easier and cheaper to running several models of a can (Coke, Pepsi, etc) or pizza box (Papa Johns, Dominos, etc), or something else cookie cutter enough to drop into certain scenes and render before release. We aren't too far off from deep fakes of everything either allowing an actor's captured facial features to be translated across bodies without even needing them to come in and record new lines.

Walt Disney's ambition for the original Fantasia movie was that it would remain in cinemas with new segments replacing old ones over time.

>>> - The opposite of what akersten said: introduce new little easter eggs or features regularly over the course of the film's theater run to encourage repeat ticket buying from the hardcore fans.

soo... what happened with evangelion?

My college roommate memorized a Siegfried and Roy monologue joke that was taken out of Ace Ventura Pet Detective pretty quickly. As far as I’m aware I only ever saw that version one time, so I knew he wasn’t crazy. Interesting thing is that you can still google that joke, but it’s not in the movie.

The shared cultural experience of the movie is lost if everyone has different scenes, if the jokes are different, if the details vary too much.

It would be quite easy to fall into uncanny valley territory.

Ace Ventura was the first time I noticed differences in a movie. When they showed it on regular TV they did a whole bit about star trek when he was in the pool looking for clues. Everyone thought I was nuts, but years later I learned that when they edit a film for commercials sometimes they use deleted scenes to make up the time differences. Harry Potter is like that too, but I can't remember the specific scenes.

I was convinced for years that there was a scene in Dune where they show the making of the water of life, by drowning a young worm in water. I had seen it in the cinema when I was quite young but it never showed up on rewatching.

20 years later I found out that there was such a scene, and it was just as I remembered, but it was only in an extended, poorly made tv-edition cut that was never shown in theatres.

I still don't know what happened there, really.

I think that’s the Alan Smithee cut. I have it as part of a steel box Dune set. It’s interesting to watch some of the stuff that was cut.

That scene in NCIS where two people are typing on the same keyboard at the same time was removed in the DVD.

Film the audience as they enter the theater and insert them in the movie as extras. Use AI to alter their facial expressions and movements, perhaps even give them dialog. Each showing of the movie would be unique.

I think this would make more sense as an added extra or gift set.

> Regional versions of films

This already happens in India. I can’t remember the title but there was a film where two stars from neighbouring states (I think it was Kerala and Tamil Nadu) fought each other and each one won the final battle in their respective states.

I'm somehow not at all surprised. Bollywood movies are hilarious. :)

I believe something like this was done for Zootopia. The news reporter characters were specific to the language regions where the movie played.

It’s called localization. Most feature animation projects do localizations of varying degrees so that their movies make cultural sense to the regions they’re played in, allowing the audience to better relate to the film.

I've never seen it, but I remember hearing that the same thing happened in the old Godzilla Versus King Kong movie. Godzilla wins in the Japanese version while King Kong does in the American one.

in Russian version Elton John wasnt gay. Granted, that was done by the distributor just cutting out the scenes, yet given the technological developments like deep fakes i think it would in near future be possible to straighten things out in more natural and artistically non-intrusive way.

> This could end up being a really interesting precedent in film (not in a way I like, personally)...

Cinema as a Service (CaaS)?

This isn’t new. The US ending of the big blue was switched to a happy one

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Blue#Original_and_alte...

It's literally how mythos and folklore has always worked.

A couple of tropes and interchangeable characters.

> A/B testing different versions of films with live audiences and tweaking.

Test screenings are a thing and they can very much influence the final product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_screening

I guess they didn't test Cats.

Mate, this is nothing new... just have a look at what happened with Blade Runner, or infamously the first Star Wars trilogy: every new release tweaked this or that, and it’s now extremely hard to find the original theatrical versions.

Having it explicitly done in a transparent way would actually be an improvement. It would trigger the necessary alerts for archivists to get to work, and we’d never risk losing the historical record of a film.

Changing from cinema to home video is one thing. Changing while still in cinemas is something else, though

i had this experience when blade runner was released in china. really wanted to see it in the theater but then learned parts had been censored. the problem wasn't really the extent of the actual censoring (i think they only removed some boobs), but the knowledge it had been censored without knowing which parts. just as with censorship i don't feel like there's any way companies would want to make changes like ad placement explicit. they would want seamless edits...

After the initial release of The Shining, Stanley Kubrick decided to make one final edit to remove a scene at the end of the movie and the studio sent instructions to every theater to perform the edit on their physical copies of the film and return the cut segment of film to the studio.

Regional variation is already here. The news anchors in "Zootopia" were different in different countries: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/76784/zootopia-has-diffe...

Same with “Inside Out.” They replaced the broccoli on the plate with other vegetables in Japan because broccoli isn’t coded as something kids are disgusted by over there.

Green bell pepper in Japan. I saw a Hello Kitty cartoon that also used pepper.

Inside Out did this as well:

https://slate.com/culture/2015/07/inside-out-director-pete-d...

Demolition Man had Taco Bell but Pizza Hut internationally.

the movie where he doesn't know how to use the 3 seashells?

Lol what kind of dummy doesn’t know how to use the three seashells.

KPop has been doing regional variation for a while.

Iron man did this as well with extra scenes.

Those sort of things would kill any interest I might otherwise have in seeing those movies.

Interesting that no one has mentioned Sonic the Hedgehog movie.

The first trailer came out and everyone thought it was terrible: https://youtu.be/4mW9FE5ILJs

It had to be taken back to the drawing boards, and they pushed back the release date. The new one is much better. This must be the first case of movie trailer A/B test

I don't think it's the first case, movie studios have used focus groups for a long time.

I'm sure the Sonic movie used focus groups as well. The difference is they all seemingly signed off on it and it wasn't until the first trailer dropped and the people's reaction was so negative that they decided to redo it.

Think I heard the FX team behind Sonic went bankrupt. That’s going to serve as a cautionary tale, if anything.

why speculate when it's so easy to google?

I'm sorry that you're being downvoted. It would be nice if people verified facts they aren't sure of before spreading them and furthering misinformation.

Funnily enough a search for "sonic fx team bankrupt" on Google now links to the original comment on HN.

Shutting down, not bankrupt:

https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/12/12/animation-studio-res...

For other reasons, afaik.

I'm more and more convinced that it's a bad cop-good cop sort of promotion going on in both cases:

1) Publish trailer with atrocious version

2) Wait patiently for reactions and news coverage

3) Announce that you will revise the art before the release of the movie due to feedback from the public (when in fact it was a "build one to throw away" sort of thing)

I don't remember where I heard that, but in the context of that specific trailer and film, some VFX guy was saying that typically, at the point a trailer is released, the CGI in the trailer is about as far as production has gone with CGI.

It's silly of them to dump more money into this trainwreck. It's been savaged by every reviewer, and while some criticism has been directed at the "uncanny valley" CGI, most of the criticism has been about the story and characterizations.

The only reason they are trying to "fix" it, is because they had so many big name people attached to it. Which, to be honest, I'm really confused about. The only reason I can think of is that it was based on a stage musical.

Another reason might be that they were paid a lot of money.

I’m not even an actor and if someone said they wanted me to have a bit part “in a movie with Judy Dench” I’d be like yeah okay. Poor Idris. I want to love him but he’s in so, so many bad movies.

You get a couple of names on board based on an early draft of the script, they took a chance on you or they had a moment of bad judgement. But your peers come on board because you did, and pretty soon you have an all star cast and... dreck.

Then it seems like everyone remembers that star power can’t fix everything and it’s a while before the same thing happens again. Cats just seems to be this cycle’s cautionary tale.

This is exactly how the supposedly terrible film Movie 43 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_43) was made.

The director, Tom Hooper, has made better movies in the past, notably The King's Speech (big winner at the Oscars in its year) and Les Miserables (got at least decent reviews).

I think the reality is they simply didn't finish. They reached a hard deadline and got something out, but they knew it needed a bit more work.

This isn't like George Lucas changing Star Wars, this is just like begging the teacher to accept an slightly altered version of a paper a day late, because you ran out of time and had to turn something in, but you'd prefer they take this version.

There’s simply no amount of CG fixes that can make this movie better. If anything the really poor CG made it at least somewhat entertaining. It’s just a bad movie, it happens.

Did you actually see it?

I imagine a lot of people will enjoy it. I saw the original musical decades ago, and it was ok, but I prefer the CG cats. I'd watch it the same way I watch music videos.

Yes. There was very obvious CG mistakes such as the lack of shadows, cats floating above the ground, collars clipping through their necks, name tags missing text from cut to cut, fur on the hands not being motion tracked correctly, etc.

But that was actually entertaining to laugh at them.

I think the issue is that people are going expecting a movie version of a musical with an entertaining plot, and Cats in any form just isn't going to supply that. The casting is all over the place, and the way they animated the cats sealed the deal. I just don't think it should have been made into a movie, or if it did it shouldn't have been expected to do well in a mass market. Your watch case makes sense but seems like an outlier in the general population.

It didn’t really strike me as looking that terrible. I certainly didn’t have the visceral reaction the article describes. I had to watch the trailers again to understand what they were talking about... it’s a film about human-cat hybrids that communicate through interpretive dance and overblown songs, what the fuck do people expect!?

Mind, I really enjoyed the Lion King remake. It didn’t tarnish my childhood memory of the original (which would be quite difficult, since my parents could only afford a poor quality pirate VHS copy, and not the cinema trip). Apparently people hated that too.

Cats looks surreal enough that it’d probably be a good date flick, nothing to actually take seriously. Definitely a memorable moment. Same as watching the Twilight films.

This was my reaction too. "Yep, looks exactly how a Cats screenplay would look."

I think these are all just people coming out of the woodwork who never liked Cats. Or people who haven't seen it on stage and didn't realize how silly and weird it already is.

I bought a Jar-Jar-Binks-free re-cut of The Phantom Menace at a science fiction convention dealers room.

Haven't you read of Darth Jar Jar theory that hints he's a sith lord in disguise, and not a comedic relief sidekick? https://darthjarjar.com/original-theory-by-lumpawarroo/

Reddit has a collection of reviews [1], that have some really funny quotes.

My favourite being from the Boston Globe [2], comparing the screening to a real-life springtime for hitler

> As Dame Judi carefully enunciated each verse, then paused, then started a new verse, the audience began to titter. Then laugh. Then roar. Because each pause seemed to signal — at long last — the film’s end, each new verse became a fresh source of hilarity. It was that rare occurrence: a packed theater going the full “Springtime for Hitler” and giving release to blessed, hard-earned mockery.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/eckx4x/cats_review_... [2] https://www.bostonglobe.com/2019/12/18/arts/claws-out/

The Reddit threads of regular people who have gone to see it have been wildly entertaining to read as well. It sounds like unintentional David Lynch. Some of the reported FX glitches have made me wonder how on earth it was released.

When does this patch land? I was hoping to see the original in all its glory, but don't have time until later this week...

I’m sure it’ll leak to torrents soon (if it hasn’t already). It’s too much of a meme-fest not to.

Previously discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21861294 , where I also linked to an interesting analysis of a VFX supervisor, and the original Hollywood reporter article

This actually happens quite a bit between the premiere and general release of a film, more so for VFX heavy features. Often the version screened at the premiere and crew screenings will omit shots or be cut with early versions of a shot that's still on the renderwall. Sometimes you also get alternate versions of the end crawl with eulogies for crew members who've died during production.

This wasn't possible up until relatively recently; you would have to lock everything down by reel for printing. But given the prevalence of digital projectors and distribution you can go right down to the minute.

Since some people might pay again to see the "improved" version (after some of them likely saw the original version to see for themselves what all the screaming was about) - is this a film industry version of a DLC?

Recall that Highlander 2 and Highlander 2: Director’s Cut are practically different movies thanks to significant editing (H2 being so bad that H3 actually apologized and reset the plot line to the end of H1).

To be fair you have to pretty heavily retcon at least the implied ending of Highlander 1 to even have a sequel at all.

Yeah, H3 actually reset storyline to about 10 minutes before the end of H1. (I was trying to be concise.)

And by "H3 apologized for H2" I mean the main character literally sat in a chair, looked into the camera, broke the 4th Wall, and in flowery terms apologized for H2.

This reminds me of the interesting metaphysical argument that happened when Kanye released The Life of Pablo to streaming services and then tweeted “Imma fix Wolves”. To my knowledge, you have to really Google around to find the original version of the song Wolves today (it would probably be harder if Kanye had “fixed” it without announcing it first).

Basically, what is “Cats (2019)”? Is it the thing people saw last weekend? The thing people will see next weekend? The further edited thing that shows up on streaming services in a few months? Or does “Cats” just refer to the idea of a motion-captured live adaptation of the book musical “Cats” that stars a certain group of people but takes many forms depending on when it was viewed?

People don't have this kind of philosophical meltdown when shows are changed from one performance to the next on Broadway.

That's the expectation with live musicals and part of the reason why people go see them in the first place - it's a unique, evolving experience.

Movies shouldn't be that way - they should have ISBN numbers or something - if you want to re-make it, you shouldn't just be able to erase the original.

We're going to wind up in some terrible place where if you pre-order your movie ticket you can see the Target special edition of Avengers Endgame 8 that is only available in theaters for two weeks before it switches to some other version. Maybe we'll get to the point where movie theaters will just perpetually have the same film on roll and update it every couple of months with the latest patches like an MMO. Remember, your Avengers and Superman subscriptions are different.

This sure makes me feel crotchety.

I'm pretty sure highly-accurate audiovisual media are all tied up in fear of death at this point, in a way that a given live performance of something cannot be, so it bothers us when they're not eternal and unchanging, while live shows do not.

The modern day ship of Theseus.

Replacing <5% of the parts does not get you a ship of Theseus.

just iterate

That costs as much as making a new movie, so I expect roughly nobody to do that. We can worry about it when it happens outside of an art film.

Editing already-released media isn't that novel a concept. Books have been getting updated in reprints since forever. Video games are constantly patched. Movies have always put out "re-cut" or other editions in later releases and on home video. The big change now is really the frequency of it, as everything continues to go digital.

The way things are going, soon it'll be common to say "I'm going to watch the movie a few weeks after release once they have worked out all the bugs".

Kill me now; before all my bugs are worked out...

Fair enough, but in the past all of these things (Video Games excepted, they’re part of a newer wave of media) usually came in “editions”. Careful fans know the difference between the original theater cut of Star Wars: A New Hope, as opposed to the original VHS release as opposed to the late 90’s VHS and later DVD releases.

When Kanye “fixed Wolves”, it’s not like the new version showed up as part of “The Life Of Pablo (Remastered Edition)”. He just overwrote the file on the streaming services’ CDNs, and since this is in an age where few people keep copies of their music, the old version sort of disappeared.

> Careful fans know the difference between the original theater cut of Star Wars: A New Hope

Careful fans know the original theatrical cut was just called Star Wars :-)

The real problem, then, is not the update itself but rather the distribution mechanism (who really "owns" the content?).

If I buy a song digitally on Amazon and save it to my local disk, Kanye isn't going to be able to touch it later. If I download it again tomorrow it may be completely different, but I still have the old version with me (same as a cassette or DVD).

If I use Amazon's (or Spotify's or Apple's) streaming service, however, the songs are on their servers, and I am only paying for temporary access. I get to listen only to whatever version they want to send me at any point in time.

> Star Wars: A New Hope?

What is this? ;)

Star Wars, and the later Empire Strikes Back were good films, well worth seeing. I still have the "making of" souvenir from the 1977 UK premiere. Then he started the endless pissing about reinventing everything. Last time I tried to watch one, some asshole had ruined it, and my memory of it, and that dog eared magazine souvenir looks quaintly inaccurate.

Now I essentially hate the whole franchise, and actively avoid anything George Lucas. I think I've seen 5 of the 7. Or is it 8 now? Don't care or notice any more. :)

Stargate, Star Trek and those 50's B movie sci-fi and countless others like "classic" low budget Dr Who have managed to last the decades far better... I actually still like those, and still watch new productions!

As for cats, far better to accept they got entirely the worst spot on the anthropomorphising spectrum so even stills look weirdly off and the story telling failed, so it's a dud. Try again in ten years with a new approach and team...

Technically some of Doctor Who has not survived, but that's for unrelated reasons (there simply aren't any known recordings of some episodes.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes

> and my memory of it

If you revisit something years later, you find your memory will differ. Clearly we know Star Wars is always updated, and other films have been too (ET comes to mind), but even films that haven’t been changed will have false memories — your mindset when you first watched it, stage of life, etc will affect how you remember and how you fill in the blanks

There’s then the technical changes - speeding up a 24fps to 25fps (in Europe), or 3:2 pull down in the US, changes to colour space, changes to aspect ratio, all add to subtle changes on how you perceive a movie.

Some people I sit that Froot Loops were Fruit Loops, that curious George had a tail (or didn’t?), that Mandela died in prison, etc.

Memory is a strange thing, just revisiting a film you watched as a kid even if it’s identical will be able to “ruin your memory”

All true, and TV showing brings shortening, censorship and cutting or beeping a swear word (in the US), or violence (in the UK) etc. I grew up a little so I don't even hide any more when Patrick Troughton is about to be killed by Daleks! :)

But I do like to revisit what it was, warts, ancient effects and all, rather than a moving target that keeps reinventing the wheel.

You never get the “as it was” though - you change. You get older, the characters you identify with change, the feelings change.

The one thing I remember from watching “The Net” in the 90s was Sandra Bullock on the beach, as I was a hormonal teenager. I have no doubt there were other parts of the film. The emphasis will be different to my memory.

I'd highly recommend searching for 4K77 if you haven't already. It's well worth seeing if you want to relive your memories.

Aha, a brilliant idea. Thank you!

Can confirm, 4K77 is all you need. There's an in-progress scan & clean of Empire, too, and in the meantime the Despecialized edition is an OK substitute. IIRC ROTJ is done already (I think the sources were easier to come by than Empire, or just happened to fall into the right hands first, or something), though I haven't watched it yet.

> I think I've seen 5 of the 7. Or is it 8 now?

11 theatrical releases (not counting re-edits), unless I'm missing something. (Episodes 1-9, not in that order, plus two "A Star Wars Story" films.)

Wasn’t just Wolves either. There is at least one lyrical change on Famous and he also added the Saint Pablo track.

Kept both copies of the album and version numbered them.

Are fiction books really that updated (in terms of the words, not formatting)? I'd argue that a movie's visuals are part of the experience, but something like the font or pagination doesn't change the experience of a book in a significant way. Movies have been changed, but it's usually due to where it's being watched (like different screen shapes) or in more minor ways.

And when movies get changed, people have problems with it. People want to see the original Star Wars, but can't. Did Han shoot first? Still, the changes in Star Wars seem minor by comparison. Yes, they updated the special effects and made some edits. This sounds like they're changing the whole visual effect of the movie because it's weirding people out. Like, imagine if they updated R2D2 and C3PO to be completely different; imagine if they changed Darth Vader to David Prowse's voice after initially being released as James Earl Jones.

I think we historically haven't seen this in theaters because of the cost involved. It's not like a streaming service where you just get Netflix to encode the new version you give them.

Yea, things have always been altered, but this feels like it's breaking the shared experience of seeing Cats. Whether Han shot first is subtle and I probably wouldn't have noticed the change and I think people can ultimately share in the common experience of seeing Star Wars even if they've seen different versions. I guess it's just a matter of how drastic the changes feel and whether it will break the shared experience we generally feel. We don't know what "improved visuals" really means yet and how that will change the experience.

> Are fiction books really that updated (in terms of the words, not formatting)?

Sometimes, but not often enough, in the way that's under discussion, that it's a fair comparison to what's already done in the film world, I think. There are a few famous examples (The Hobbit having a scene significantly modified to better fit the LOTR, for example) but major modifications to different releases, for reasons other than censorship (which strikes film and books alike), aren't as common as in film, I'd say.

> Are fiction books really that updated (in terms of the words, not formatting)?

I read American Gods and was amazed that such a bloated story could have won the Hugo and Nebula awards. And it turned out it didn't; despite advertising those awards on the cover, the text I had read was 12,000 words longer than the one that had been awarded.

Why would they do that?

Author's ego probably. Or just an attempt to get people who've already read it to buy a second copy (the version in question was released 10 years later.)

> A special tenth anniversary edition, which includes the "author's preferred text" and 12,000 additional words, was published in June 2011 by William Morrow. The tenth anniversary text is identical to the signed and numbered limited edition released in 2003 by Hill House Publishers, and to the edition from Headline, Gaiman's publisher in the UK since 2005.[2] The tenth anniversary edition marks the first time the author's preferred text has been available in wide release outside the UK.[14]

Why would you be surprised for a Hugo? The Hugos are deliberately pure popularity contest, they're a fan award. There is nothing wrong with that, but it makes winning a Hugo more like having a gold YouTube plaque than say winning a conventional literary prize like the Booker. It doesn't have to be any "good" whatever that means so long as enough members of the fan community like it.

The Nebula has a smaller problem because its members are at least nominally actual authors, so you don't have fan contigents bloc voting like the Hugos and most SFWA members know something about what makes a good novel but it's still definitely there.

You seem to have posted a free-floating critique of the Hugo that has nothing to do with what I wrote. (If anything, I have more faith in the Hugo award to reject overwrought and overlong works than a more conventional literary award).

So, your theory is that fans aren't the ones who uncritically support overlong works? Presumably in your mind the Transformers and Pirates movies kept being made because although fans noticed they were long slogs with nothing left to say and stayed away, the critical acclaim ensured the studios reinvested?

Wait, no, those franchises got horrible reviews and they were made because fans kept turning out to buy tickets for each iteration. Exactly the opposite of what you seem to believe.

It's not a critique of the Hugos, they aren't pretending to be anything else except a popularity contest. A whole bunch of the voters (including some people I know) voted for that novel having read the version you feel is bloated. They liked it. That's fans for you.

> Presumably in your mind the Transformers and Pirates movies kept being made because although fans noticed they were long slogs with nothing left to say and stayed away, the critical acclaim ensured the studios reinvested?

The critical attack on those movies is just the opposite: that they're overly flighty, hyperactive even. A large part of their popular success is that they keep their pacing up even at the expense of things that the critical establishment might consider more important.

> A whole bunch of the voters (including some people I know) voted for that novel having read the version you feel is bloated.

No, they didn't. That version wasn't published until a year after the Hugo. That was my whole point.

> The critical attack on those movies is just the opposite: that they're overly flighty, hyperactive even

That's not the opposite. "What you end up with is something that spends an awfully long time, although not as long as its predecessors, doing a load of things that don't ever actually get anywhere". That's a quote from Mark Kermode reviewing "On Stranger Tides" the fourth of the Pirates movies. The main thrust of his criticism is that this movie is faithful to its origins specifically in the sense that it's an amusement park ride, a bunch of superficially exciting things happen in a pre-determined order that doesn't mean anything, nobody is changed by the experience and the operators of the ride don't care because now they have your money.

Frenetic action is NOT the opposite of "long slogs with nothing left to say" any more than a carousel ride is the opposite of going nowhere.

> That version wasn't published until a year after the Hugo.

That's correct. But my understanding is that Neil's "preferred text" largely existed before the initial publication and a version of that was seen by fan readers. His editor, like you, thought it needed substantial trimming. His fans don't agree. The text you have also includes some bug fixes, but they're not why it's so long.

> That's not the opposite. "What you end up with is something that spends an awfully long time, although not as long as its predecessors, doing a load of things that don't ever actually get anywhere". That's a quote from Mark Kermode reviewing "On Stranger Tides" the fourth of the Pirates movies. The main thrust of his criticism is that this movie is faithful to its origins specifically in the sense that it's an amusement park ride, a bunch of superficially exciting things happen in a pre-determined order that doesn't mean anything, nobody is changed by the experience and the operators of the ride don't care because now they have your money.

The attack here is that it has nothing to say, not that it's overlong/bloated. If you think a movie is saying nothing then even 10 minutes would be "too long", but the movie's length isn't the salient problem.

> my understanding is that Neil's "preferred text" largely existed before the initial publication and a version of that was seen by fan readers

A handful of fan readers may have seen that text, but surely not a significant fraction of Hugo voters. Again this is a case where a popular vote has an advantage: voting will necessarily be based on what was widely published, whereas when an award is given by insiders it's more common for them to have access to a different edit.

Diane Duane's young wizards series was updated to be less technologically passe.

In particular, the second book of the series had a home computer as a major plot point, and it was described as booting to a BASIC prompt (I own the original, but haven't read the update).

As best as I can tell the update was never released in physical form, only as an eBook. Pretty cheap too: $20 for the entire series.

But I prefer physical books so I'm hoping it will be released.

Also it's more than just old tech: the tech actually changes in between each book so there is no consistency at all.

The new version puts all the tech at the same level.

Oh and some scenes from the unreleased movie were added.

Before 1986, US versions of A Clockwork Orange didn't include the final chapter.

I wonder if Cats really deserved the fait it wrought. You have to wonder if it was universally seen to be terrible, or if a couple of early opinions led a wave of negative opinions. Tough to really know.

> I wonder if Cats really deserved

No need to wonder. See it for yourself and form your own opinion.

One can wonder without initiative.

Perhaps the time or money necessary to satisfy the question is worth more than the answer.

The peak weirdness is probably this part:

https://twitter.com/data_bayes/status/1209340322767081472

Why is this so weird? Maybe I watch too many weird films...

It is not specifically weird, but it seems like public someway started to associate anthropomorphic animals with sexual fetishes, so when they see cat eating cockroach in that scene for example they think about vore fetish and so on.

Even putting that aside, it's more the kind of thing you'd expect in an art film than something intended for general audiences, even assuming the film overall is good (or good at doing whatever it's trying to do) which does not seem to be a safe assumption in this case.

A creature with a human face is casually eating another creature with a human face, whole. That's weird and a description of "vore" is fair even if you're absolutely sure there's nothing sexual going on.

I'm aware of the vore associations.

However, were the original characters in the Cats play actually humanoid cats? Or were they just humans dressing up as cats and the audience was meant to suspend disbelief that what they were looking at were just regular cats?

I ask because obviously a play can't get "live talking cats" without human actors but a movie can easily do so with CG.

Why did they decide to go with humanoid cats instead of regular cats with voice actors? Was it just to match the aesthetic of the play? Or does the plot actually involve the cats being canonicaly humanoid?

The musical is performed in costume. Yes audiences suspend disbelief, just as they do when, say, Romeo clearly isn't really dead in a typical performance of Shakespeare's play.

The musical is based on an existing work, a correction of amusing poems about actual cats by T S Eliot.

Probably the movie just shouldn't exist. An animated movie of the poems using some famous songs from the musical could have worked for example, but that's not what this is.

> The musical is performed in costume. Yes audiences suspend disbelief, just as they do when, say, Romeo clearly isn't really dead in a typical performance of Shakespeare's play.

They were asking what specifically the costumes represent. They weren't confused about the concept of costumes in a play.

The cats are anthropomorphized somewhat, or they wouldn't be having proper conversations with each other. This already requires suspension of disbelief, accepting that it's a fantasy world. The question is how far that anthropomorphization goes, in the internal logic/canon of the play.

The stage costumes (look up 'Cats musical' on Google Images) are basically decorated bodysuits plus facepaint and wigs. They have a lot of subtle touches to keep them intentionally registering as 'acrobatic costume' without tripping uncanny valley issues, like how almost all of them include obvious belts (for the 'tails') and a clear division between body and neck/face even if the facepaint is the same color as the bodysuit being worn.

I love that kind of stuff.

Rebel Wilson I think is the only on point character from what I've seen/heard.

I really hate the confusion between whether the cats’ fur is part of their bodies or not. Like some of them seem to wear huge fur coats with obvious collars/lapels but it’s also part of their body, and in this one she unzips her... body and then there’s more underneath? When it’s really actors in costumes on stage that makes sense but that clip makes me feel queasy...

Your comment reminds me how in the Sheckley's short story "The Demons" Neelsebub was confused when human take off his coat.

I think that these scene actually removes confusion as it clearly establishes that they definitely can wear fur coats over their natural fur. I don't get how it's different from humans, we also have skin-colored clothes.

I'm hoping that is an early CGI test render and not the final product that people paid to see. Otherwise I have trouble working out where the reported massive CG budget went.

Apparently the reviews were embargoed so they really were written independently.

Embargoes stop early publication. They don't stop critics talking to each other.

Sure but what was being suggested was a bandwagon effect where a few early reviews are bad and it influences the reviews afterwards. Since the major reviews were all published on the same day that doesn't seem particularly likely.

I wonder the same.

The original musical was just as weird and creepy and lacking in any sort of coherent plot. But that was a big part of its appeal.

The musical came out at a time when you couldn't tweet to the world about how you were damaged for life by seeing something you deemed creepy, and then watch everyone else pile on. It was also before the concept of "furries" was well known, and I guess now everyone wants to make sure everyone knows they aren't into that sort of thing.

> that sort of thing

If they were going for "furry" they would not have done the faces that way.

I'm not suggesting they were going for furry, I'm just suggesting a lot of people look at the Cats movie now and make that connection (specifically the sexualization of non-human mammals).

British Pantomime is a funny thing. When it's done in the right context it's high art.

I'm sure when it premiered on the West End in 1981 the audience was in on the joke.

Monty Python had a grand time with all their Panto references. This skit could be seen as a predictor of Furry culture (even if that wasn't the intent at the time).

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2uwxiz

Lastly, this is my favorite Panto reference. In the context of the movie it's heartbreaking. Mel Brooks gave the director of Eraserhead control over this movie, and we got this. David Lynch was American but he clearly "got" was Panto was all about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq_YuPa_6_8

The elephant man clip is region locked.

I've only seen clips of the movie, but those don't look very promising IMO. I read that this had a $95 million production budget, I can't fathom what they spent it on when looking at the end result.

Beyond that I'm quite a bit sceptical of choosing Cats for a movie adaption at all. It's nowhere near 'Phantom of the Opera' in terms of popularity, and the last (2004) movie of that musical didn't do particularly well at the box office.

It could have turned out perfectly fine if they just used cats for the characters. Like, CGI cats that look like actual members of felis catus, instead of humans who accidentally drank a polyjuice potion with cat hair in it.

Alas, Tom Hooper has a habit of retaining stage musical-like elements when he makes movies based on stage musicals. He shot many scenes in Les Miserables in a way that felt more like a stage production than a cinematic one; the difference is stark if you compare it with, say, The Greatest Showman -- which is a movie about a stage production! But Les Miz wasn't too bad, it was just a bit awkward. This time it seems Hooper has gone one step too far, though.

You have to wonder if it was universally seen to be terrible, or if a couple of early opinions led a wave of negative opinions. Tough to really know.

The article notes that it had a rating of 18% on Rotten Tomatoes. That's very low, even among bad movies.

Ironically this may actually reduce its long term appeal. The original cut has the making of a cult favourite.

It's interesting that producers still send physical copies to theaters.

Not all, I believe. There are theaters that get movies thru digital transmission as well. How much it is widespread, however, I don't know.

EDIT: https://www.bizjournals.com/losangeles/news/2017/03/23/75-of... 75% of cinemas in the US get their movies digitally distributed.

Incidentally, I tried to see the new Star Wars movie today. But the projector stopped working and the employees blamed it on a computer failure.

That's cool. Thanks for the link and new information.

Those are not exactly physical copies, theaters are getting special cases with hard-drives, microcontrollers and encryption. Every presentation is accounted when played.

What the above comment is referring to is a DCP (Digital Cinema Package)[0].

However, not all locations/production houses are using the traditional DCP methodology. The Digital Cinema Distribution Coalition[1] has the goal of changing the distribution method to a satellite based digital download structure.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Cinema_Package

[1] https://www.dcdcdistribution.com/about-us/

Why would you use satellites for this?

Lots of commercial data goes via satellite and not internet. That's why so many gas stations have uplinks on their roofs.

Sure, but why? Isn’t that insanely expensive compared to cable/DSL and VPN?

Sheer data size, iirc a DCP runs in the 300-500GB range per movie. Probably a couple hours on a distribution satellite for an entire country's worth of cinema are cheaper than managing the logistics of physical HDDs.

Just share it as a torrent to all movie theatres? They'll all seed each other.

The problem is the laughable Internet downlink available especially in rural country parts - you're lucky to get 16/1 DSL there.

Broadcast encrypted data to theaters, send the licenses and decryption keys separately.

You don't remember that scene? Oh wait, my copy is Cats v2.0.36, you've still got 2.0.22, just git pull the latest.

I can't friggin wait...

Kanye West - The Life of Pablo was changed like 10+ times after release.

Also, George Lucas or somebody is still messing with the OT. For the Disney+ release of A New Hope, the scene between Greedo and Han Solo now has Greedo say "Maclunkey[0]" before shooting.

This is apparently a Huttese insult that means something like "I will end you," and it's supposed to provide moral justification for Han percieving Greedo as an imminent threat and shooting him. This is also apparently in the Dug's dialogue in The Phantom Menace. I forget the thing's name.

Also I think the timing of their shots are tweaked so they happen almost simultaneously.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mH19gKo7W7w

This will, maybe, drive some people into the theatres to see the original.

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