Is 'Cats' Movie Worse Than 'Battlefield Earth'?
by EG
The writer of the universally abhorred Scientology-adjacent movie Battlefield Earth wants you to believe that there's a new worst-ever movie in the world. JD Shapiro thinks that Cats is potentially worse than the movie he wrote, which is widely to believed to be one of the least good movies ever made. The competition is definitely close, but it might not be as close as Shapiro wants to believe it is. Read on for details.
Via Page Six.
“Battlefield Earth” has been called the worst movie of all time. An overblown, cheap space flick with laughable dialogue and an alien John Travolta, it made $29.3 million on a $73 million budget and, until “Jack and Jill” in 2012, held the most Razzies (“honoring the worst of cinematic under-achievements”). But 20 years later, its screenwriter says there is a new top flop.
“I watched about 10 or 15 minutes of ‘Cats,’ and unfortunately, it might beat out ‘Battlefield Earth,’ ” J.D. Shapiro tells The Post of the movie-musical with creepy cat-human hybrids. “To regular people, ‘Cats’ was f - - king disturbing.”
This week marks an inauspicious anniversary for the writer, who in 2010 boldly wrote a column in The Post apologizing for having helped make the reviled science-fiction movie. Shapiro, who counts “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” among his credits, reveals that interference from MGM and other outside forces derailed his vision.
Almost nothing of what the writer contributed to the screenplay, he says, remains.
“It wasn’t as I intended — promise,” Shapiro writes. “No one sets out to make a train wreck. Actually, comparing it to a train wreck isn’t really fair to train wrecks, because people actually want to watch those.”
That mea culpa proved a breakthrough moment for the writer, who after “Battlefield Earth” was in symbolic “movie prison,” writing scripts under silly pseudonyms such as Sir Nick Knack. Now, he had his peers’ respect.
“I had no idea the response it would get,” he says of the candid op-ed. “Ninety percent of it was very positive from people in the business that I was actually willing to talk about the realities of what happened with the movie. When I look back, I’m proud of the fact that I wasn’t afraid to tell my truth.”
Shapiro’s truth was so wild, it was almost unbelievable.
For newbies, “Battlefield Earth” is a 2000 film based on the 1982 novel by L. Ron Hubbard, the controversial founder of Scientology.
Get the rest of the story at Page Six.
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