By the mid-1990s, CATS had been playing continuously in the West End for over a decade, which created an unusual dilemma: how do you preserve a show built on a live audience's proximity to actors crawling at their feet? The answer came in 1997, when the production was reassembled at London's Adelphi Theatre and filmed not as a distant stage recording, but as its own hybrid creature - sets rebuilt to accommodate cameras, a company drawn from the London, Amsterdam, and New York casts, and a seventy-piece orchestra brought in to give the soundtrack a cinematic weight.

Ken Page reprised his Broadway role as Old Deuteronomy, and Elaine Paige - the actress who'd first made Grizabella immortal back in 1981 - returned to sing "Memory" for the cameras. In one of the film's quieter coups, the 90-year-old Sir John Mills stepped in as Gus the Theatre Cat, his single number less performed than confided, straight into the lens.

Released in October 1998, the film never aimed to reinvent CATS - only to preserve it for time. Decades later, that turned out to be its great virtue: watched alongside anything that came after, it stands as the closest thing to sitting in the Adelphi stalls in 1997, watching the Jellicles gather one more time.

A note before you press play: this one divided opinion like nothing else in the CATS canon. Watch with an open mind - and maybe the lights on.

The reviews were, to put it generously, not kind. Critics called it everything from "cat-astrophic" to "the worst thing to happen to cats since dogs.” It also swept that year's Razzies, taking home six awards including Worst Picture, and gave James Corden and Rebel Wilson matching trophies for Worst Supporting Actor and Actress - an honour they later joked about, gamely, from the Oscars stage. Even star Idris Elba seemed to sense trouble brewing, having once described the CGI fur effects as something that regularly wakes him up at 3am in a cold sweat. If nothing else, CATS 2019 proved one thing conclusively: you need nine lives to survive this many bad reviews.

It premiered at Alice Tully Hall in New York on 16 December 2019, before opening wide across the UK and US that same month - and immediately became one of the most talked-about releases of the year, for reasons that split sharply between spectacle, scepticism and shock. Whatever the verdict, it introduced CATS - its music, its mythology, its strange and singular world - to an audience who'd never have found their way to the Adelphi or the New London Theatre back in the day.