Chris Pratt is now also voicing Garfield for some reason

Were we, as a society, too mean to Chris Pratt? Not in the sense that it was unfair of us all to collectively decide that he’s the “worst” Hollywood Chris, but in the sense that the general negativity we used to express our limited appetite for his whole deal ended up pushing him too far away from very valid criticism. Like, if everyone is mean to him about everything, he’s just going to ignore all of it rather than pick out the stuff that really matters like “it’s completely ridiculous for you, of all people, to voice Super Mario and Garfield.”

And yet, here we are. Just a little over a month after the most inexplicable casting decision in the history of acting (the ancient Greeks knew better), Chris Pratt has landed at the center of another inexplicable casting decision. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Pratt will indeed be providing the voice of Garfield the cat in a new animated movie written by David Reynolds and directed by Mark Dindal—the pair behind Disney’s underrated The Emperor’s New Groove.

We don’t know anything else about this movie, in terms of plot or whether Anya Taylor-Joy will be playing Odie or if… Harry Styles will play Jon Arbuckle, but nothing about it should be particularly surprising now that they’ve pulled off the Chris Pratt band-aid. Also, we should acknowledge at this point that Bill Murray played Garfield in the last two movies, but that was also an inexplicable casting choice (made slightly more explicable by the story that Bill Murray somehow thought writer Joel Cohen was famous director Joel Coen).

Another thing we’ll say is that the pop cultural impact of the Garfield strip is different today than it was all those years ago, and people will be disappointed if this new movie doesn’t pay homage to that beloved strip about Jon giving birth to a healthy litter of puppies. (Is describing it that way weirder than the other way?)