Feline confident? Cats’ last-minute dash to the cinema

Tom Hooper finished off his musical just 36 hours before its premiere.

Will this, a turn-off trailer, awards snubs and an impurrfect gestation stop it being Christmas catnip?For film critics, London press screening schedules are devised like a military operation: timetabled, negotiated and cross-referenced by an army of distributors and publicists, with a view generally to keeping each major studio offering out of the other’s way.

The pre-Christmas crush is when the efficiency of the system tends to be most tested, but rarely has there been a scheduling overlap as high-profile and high-stakes as the one we saw on Monday night – as the large multimedia premieres of Cats and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker played back-to-back in Leicester Square, a long, loud double feature that sent bleary-eyed journalists home somewhere close to midnight.It wasn’t always meant to be this way.

The latest Star Wars episode had

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