The surprisingly good cast of Tom Hooper’s adaptation of Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats is about to get even more surprisingly good, because Variety is reporting that Idris Elba is “in final negotiations” to join what will surely be a big, weird musical. The film version of the iconic Broadway show already has Ian McKellen, Jennifer Hudson, James Corden, and Taylor Swift, with Elba reportedly set to play the villainous Macavity. For anyone who doesn’t already know the plot of Cats, the whole thing can seems utterly baffling, but the basic premise is that it revolves around a group of cats called the Jellicles who band together every year to decide which of them deserves to ascend to the Heaviside Layer, which is sort of like a cat heaven in space where they will be reborn into new lives. The whole thing is inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poetry collection Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats, which concerns the secret inner lives of various weird felines.
We freely admit that it’s possible we’re getting all of this wrong, so go ahead and yell at us in the comments.