Well, Thursday has proven a fairly uneventful day for capital markets. With little going on in the world of finance, the highly anticipated anti-climax that was the screen adaptation of Cats, was perhaps the only news giving us paws for thought.
After a year of build up, the cat was out of the bag, and no amount of nostalgic attachment could save this classic tail about our favourite mangy moggies.
All cat puns aside, Thursday proved an entirely underwhelming day for the kitty of Cats’s largest production company, Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) (courtesy of NBCUniversal Film and Enternatinment, via Universal Pictures, via Working Title Films).
The Group’s shares should have soared on what was pegged to be one of the great film events of the year. Alas, they were left licking their modest wounds, down 0.046% or 0.020p to 43.17p per share 19/12/19 10:18 GMT-5.
On the small matter of the film itself, Will Gompertz offered his typically on-the-nose insights on a film littered with errors and some notable individual performances:
“The sum is a great deal less than the parts, however famous and gifted the people playing them happen to be. The story takes forever to get going, and when it does – eventually – it lacks any real conviction or emotion.”
“The harsh truth is the film feels plastic, it has no heart or soul. That might well be a problem with the source material and its suitability for a transfer from stage to screen. Notwithstanding notable successes, the fact is not everything that is a hit in one medium works in another.”
“It’s not terrible, it’s certainly got more going for it than the trailer, but it is some way short of Lord Lloyd-Webber’s original.”
So, not a complete shambles, but not a Les Mis replica, either.
Elsewhere in film and media, Star Wars Origins bolsters British businesses, Cineworld Group (LON: CINE) announced a Canadian acquisition and Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) loses subscribers.
Comcast currently has a market cap of $197.39 billion and a dividend yield of 1.94%. It has been claimed that Cats ‘lacks soul’, but I should imagine its box office performance in the run-up to Christmas won’t lack teeth. I plan to see the film for myself this weekend, but for now it appears the only real losers are Cats fans.
