Jellicle Cats, Jellicle Audience: The cult phenomenon in the reception of musical cinema, 15 pages
The article aligns itself with a conceptualization of cult based on formal, thematic, and reception criteria, and through the study of the film Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019), proposes specificities of cult in the reception of the musical genre. Cats is a musical theater piece conceived by composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, based on the poems of T. S. Eliot, adapted for the screen initially in 1998, when a video-recorded version of the show was distributed. The commercial success of Cats propelled discussions of the megamusical phenomenon in the 1980s; however, the critical failure of the film in 2019 fell far short of becoming the equivalent blockbuster of cinema, and this time, the proposed debate is about the cult phenomenon.
KEYWORDS
Cats; cult films; musical cinema; reception theories
INTERCOM: 44º Brazilian Congress of Communication Sciences
Supervisor Pedro Maciel Guimarães
Author Isabella Ricchiero Stefanini
Research supported by the Institutional Program of Scientific Initiation Scholarships - CNPq (2020 - 2021)
Still of Cats (Tom Hooper, 2019)
Still of Hedwig and the Angry Inch (John Cameron Mitchell, 2001)
