Josie and the Pussycats, which underperformed at the box office more than 20 years ago, has gone on to become a cult classic.
When Josie and the Pussycats was released in 2001, the movie earned was a box office disappointment, grossing under $15 million against a reported production budget somewhere between $22 and $39 million. Because it was a movie drenched in pastel colors and product placement, it quickly became a punchline, failing to be redeemed by its fandom or by critics. A mediocre wave of reviews rolled in, cementing the movie as a flop in the public imagination and dooming it to cult classic status, the success movies like Barbie would later get evading it. And star Alan Cumming thinks that’s a shame.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly for their Pride Issue (on newsstands now), Cumming said that he thought Josie and the Pussycats was ahead of its time, and that its failure was more on Universal’s shoulders than the filmmakers’. He also noted that while Josie and the Pussycats wasn’t quite as straightforward as Spice World, the Spice Girls movie in which he starred shortly before, he did bring some of Spice World‘s DNA with him to the production of Josie.
“I had a phase in the early 2000s of doing these bonkers films on the queer scale,” Cumming said EW. “Some of them were more coded than others, but, again, about the idea of being manipulated in the media, being used…it was so ahead of its time, in terms of the subliminal messages and the product placement. I just think they didn’t quite know how to sell it. They sold it as a kind of kids film, and it really is quite adult and also hilarious. And I was actually in that film doing an impersonation of Richard E. Grant in Spice World. I just copied him.”
In Josie and the Pussycats, the titular band is recruited by Megarecords, a record company that is secretly partnered with the American government to place subliminal suggestions into popular music in order to brainwash young listeners into buying stuff they don’t need and adhering to trends. Cumming played the record executive responsible not only for recruiting Josie and the Pussycats, but also for attempting to murder DuJour, a boy band previously employed by Megarecords who had caught onto the scheme.
“I think the problem was that it was marketed really badly,” Cumming told me in a 2021 interview. “I think it was marketed to young kids sort of as a tween movie, when actually it’s quite a sophisticated script, and it’s about the gags that are for meant for sophisticated older consumers. I think they didn’t know quite what to do with it, and it was marketed wrongly. And so basically the [part] of the populace it was aimed at didn’t kind of, weren’t made aware of it when it came out.”
You can buy or rent Josie and the Pussycats on DVD, Blu-ray, and digital retailers everywhere.
