Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever Gets A Trailer

This holiday season, Lifetime will attempt to answer the question that has been plaguing filmmakers everywhere since the dawn of social media – can we realistically pad an internet meme out to feature length? If the trailer for Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever is anything to go by, the answer is, unsurprisingly, a resounding ‘no.’ Or, to quote the TV movie’s highly inventive tagline, “Ho ho no.”

Remember the 2001 film Cats And Dogs – a live-action movie featuring real animals with human voices, acting out an amusing caper, with a stellar cast led by Jeff Goldblum, Sean Hayes and Tobey Maguire? That was an enjoyable project in its day, thirteen years ago. Now, here we are, in 2014, watching a trailer for a movie about a cat who became a web sensation by looking perpetually unimpressed. If I were the feline involved in Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever, I too would be experiencing a negative mood.

So, on the spectrum of famous animals, where does Grumpy Cat feature? Is she Lassie-level? No. Lassie may well have been a hero that rescued injured children from abandoned mineshafts, but Grumpy Cat is much more famous. She is a young moggy named Tardar Sauce, who shot to fame when the brother of her owner – Tabatha Bundesen – posted a picture of her on the website Reddit in 2012. The photograph was seized upon, with people turning it into an image macro, featuring a range of grumpy captions. Hilarity ensued.

Since then, Grumpy Cat has become a social media star, and has featured on the cover of New York Magazine. She has her own manager, website, book, calendar and licensed merchandise – as well as having had an iced coffee beverage named after her (the ‘Grumppuccino’). Now, she has her own movie, too, in which her biting satire is given voice by Aubrey Plaza (Life After Beth) and her trademark deadpan delivery.

The film is written by Tim Hill (writer of SpongeBob Squarepants, director of Garfield 2) and Jeff Morris (You Did What?), and its plot – such as it is – seems to concern a young girl (Megan Charpentier) adopting Grumpy Cat in the run up to the festive season and somehow becoming embroiled in an action-packed incident. Far be it from me to disparage a female-led movie, but I suspect that Lifetime’s Grumpy Cat’s Worst Christmas Ever – set to debut on the channel on November 29th 2014 – will be a shining example of why internet memes should be left just as they are.