Will J.D. Vance give CatVideoFest a surprise bump this year?
“There’s a reason why any mention of cats or cat ladies or anything like that kind of takes off. Because it’s this sort of hidden army online. Until you tick them off,” says Will Braden, founder and curator of the annual compilation that hits theaters today.
So he’s not shying away from a bit of tongue-in-cheek marketing after the Internet blew up at remarks by the Republican VP nominee calling prominent Democratic women miserable, childless cat ladies. Braden recently posted a famous 1961 Hollywood photo of a line of women, each with a black cat on a leash (they were auditioning the cats for a horror film), adding the caption ‘2024 Voting Lines’. It has the most views of any post ever on the CatVideoFest site. The timing was “absolutely perfect.”
The annual video event launched formally in 2019 with Oscilloscope distributing and found an audience, grossing over $600k last year at indie theaters from Alamo Drafthouses to the IFC Center to the Music Box in Chicago. It opens this weekend and rolls out through September to about 200 locations all in.
Theaters often donate a percentage of ticket sales to local animal shelters, which sometimes set up outside screenings with cats that need adopting, making it a community event. It’s raised $170k for charities since 2019.
Braden watched about 15,000 cat videos, including 1,000 direct submissions, to settle on 200 clips for this year’s 75-minute reel. He scours social media then hunts down the originals to get permissions. “There’s a lot of content out there but tracking down the original person who actually filmed it is getting harder. That’s the lion’s share of work,” he tells Deadline.
YouTube was the original gusher but other outlets have caught up, including Reddit.
“It’s really helpful for sort of consolidating. It’s an aggregator. If I want to see cats with huge fluffy tails, there’s a subreddit for cats with huge fluffy tails.”
He divides cat videos into two broad categories.
“The kind of accidental cat video, kind of the old America’s Funniest Home Videos, where something funny happens.”
The other is where “people kind of create a cat character.” That’s what Braden did with his own first cat video during film school — of his mother’s black cat as a depressed French existential feline named Honoré. It took top prize at a cat video competition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2012.
The work requires diplomacy. “I get a lot of submissions from people who are just like, you know, this is my cat, check this out. And it’s a cute cat but nothing’s happening in the video. And I have to respond to people, you know, you have a great looking cat. But nothing’s happening.”
For exhibitors, CatVideoFest crosses demographic and geographic lines. “We have videos from every state in the United States. And we have videos from all over the world,” Braden says. “There aren’t that many things that appeal to a six-year-old and a 60-year-old.”
He tries to find unusual clips “that aren’t just a viral video that was big on Instagram or TikTok” and explores “the different ideas of what a cat video can be. I always have some music videos, and things that are animated, and things that are sort of mini-documentaries about rescues and things like that. And I do a lot of chopping, making sure that the pace doesn’t feel repetitive.”
At a complicated time in the entertainment industry, this feels like a secure gig.
“The Internet runs on cats … They run social media. They get shared more than anything else. There is an endless supply. I will never run out.”