Update 4/2/2020: A fan has stepped up to produce a trailer with restored buttholes, and it is glorious.

CATS: The Butthole Cut www.youtube.com

In recent months writer Jack Waz has made it his mission to gift the world what we were deprived of on December 20 of last year.

In the rush to prepare a final cut of Cats—including edits that continued until just 36 hours before the film's premiere—Director Tom Hooper made a grave error: He deleted the butth*les. Jack Waz is the absolute unit of a Hollywood writer who has devoted himself to righting that grave injustice.

If you saw the film, you may have assumed that the utter lack of visible butth*les on any of the humanoid cat-monsters was simply a gross oversight. For a film that features Sir Ian McKellen perfectly embodying the physicality of an aging stage cat—complete with meows, grooming, and lapping up milk—it was instantly off-putting to not see the entire cast constantly displaying their butth*les to one another and the camera.

Anyone who's ever been intimately familiar with a cat knows that, along with rubbing their cheeks against you, letting you get a good look at their naked pink butth*les is among the best ways they have of showing their affection. Did Tom Hooper and the effects team seriously forget to include that? How much work are we as the audience supposed to do in suspending our disbelief? For the true cat lovers among us, it lent an eerie sense of unease to all the Jellicle interactions—as though these hideous cat-creatures, that are supposedly all members of a tight-knit organization, were holding onto a secret distrust of one another. In every shot of the film—even when butts were prominently on display—there was nary a butth*le to be found. Were they all clenching so tightly? Why were they concealing their butth*les?!

Jack Waz has the answer, and has spent the last three months trying to spread the word of the Butth*le Cut to a world that ignored him—until Tuesday night, when his message finally got some attention and became a trending topic on Twitter—even receiving an endorsement from Star Wars: The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson. Maybe it's because social-distancing for the coronavirus pandemic has pushed culture increasingly online, or because Cats has recently become available through on-demand streaming services—prompting Seth Rogen to live-tweet his first viewing while high. Whatever it was that got people to finally notice, Jack Waz had the inside scoop.

According to a tweet from Waz, an acquaintance who works in visual effects was brought onto the project in its final months to remove butth*les from around 400 shots of what would have been a much better movie. To put that in perspective, the final cut of Avengers: Infinity War contains around 2,900 visual effects shots in total. In other words, 400 altered shots represents a huge chunk of the movie that originally featured the butth*les that we all went to this movie expecting. How much time and money went into removing the most expressive part of a cat-chimera's body from the film? Those resources could have been spent on improving scale issues, replacing human hands, and cleansing the world of the image of tiny, line-dancing mouse and roach-people being swallowed by Rebel Wilson.

If censoring the butth*les was deemed necessary to maintaining the film's baffling PG rating, they could have at least allowed the cats the dignity of Twinkle Tushes—the only jewelry designed to hang from a cat's tail and cover its butth*le. Instead, they opted to rob them of their essential character, their felinity, their butth*les.

Thankfully, now that Jack Waz has brought this issue to light, we can abandon juvenile fantasies like the #SnyderCut and the #JJCut, and focus on a movement that can unite the world. In one voice we must rise up against this injustice and demand that Universal Pictures release the butth*le cut. #ReleaseTheButth*leCut