The 'Cats' Butthole Cut Mystery: 'It Wasn't In Your Face... (But) You'll See It'

"Release the Butthole Cut of Cats!!" demanded actor Seth Rogen last month in a tweet that caught the eye of "Cats"-fanciers (the movie, that is) on social media. His tweet went viral, earning 6,200 retweets and nearly 51,000 likes.

Rogen's cry for the release came when he learned from screenwriter Jack Waz, "who claimed to know a visual effects artist who had been tapped to work on 'Cats' back in November," Vanity Fair reports. Waz wrote on Twitter that the person's job was "[t]o remove CGI buttholes that had been inserted a few months before. Which means that, somewhere out there, there exists a butthole cut of 'Cats.'"

Waz told Vanity Fair he reached out to Universal to see the film's "butthole cut" but "hit nothing but dead ends." Even his initial source declined to give him more information. Then writer/director Ben Mekler tweeted that he looking for more information about the making of the movie and received a response from an anonymous "Cats" crew member who wrote that the "butthole" shots were never intentional.

"There were never shots of cats with butt holes. Or at least by design, None that I saw anyway. However, there were a dozen or so shots where the skin and fur sim was groomed or folded in a way that really REALLY looked like very furry lady genitals and buttholes by accident," the source said. "The task (as typical with heavy cg shows) fell on 2D to paint out the offending articles where it was brought up and spotted. Daily reviews were constant awkward discussions of people plucking up the courage to point things like this out; 'does that look like a fanny to you?'"

Both Universal and Mill Film, the VFX company that handled much of the work on "Cats," both declined to give further information to Vanity Fair. When a Universal rep was asked (in what they called their "favorite email of all time"), they replied: "Hopefully that will add to the magic and mythical nature of the cinematic treasure." Mill Farm responded that they couldn't give any information "largely due to the NDAs that forbid VFX studios and crew members from speaking candidly about 'creative iterations which may or may not have contributed to the final product seen on-screen, or left on cutting room floors,'" writes Vanity Fair.

But the elusive buttholes refuse to go away, and