Can you source this rumor? It sounds like the Occam's Razor on the problem. It doesn't take that much to add a butthole to a CG cat. And if you're sitting there drawing CGI cats for 60 hours a week, that butthole is the one thing that brings you joy. Then suddenly the studio decides that uhhh, this clusterfuck is going to lose any money you throw at it so three quarters of the VFX crew gets pinkslipped. Which means the buttholes that were an in-joke for six studios worth of pixelmonkeys? Suddenly become a stab-to-the-eye reminder of back when things sucked less. Tom Hooper and CGI musicals aren't new; when the quandry of "how do you get people to sing"/"how do you not show big stupid microphones everywhere" for Les Miserables was solved by rotoscoping out all the mics, Tom Hooper got a bad impression of what CGI is and does. Granted - any child can be made to grasp "it takes twelve hours to render the fur every time we change the moves" but Hollywood is a culture where everyone bends over backwards to not upset the children. Ever seen a dozen PAs making $15 an hour trying to detail an Escalade in a mud pit using wet wipes so that the network exec can get picked up in a clean car? I have.
It's a deliberately unsourced rumor from an anonymous source relayed by a youtuber who claimed to know the source. Regardless the movie was a waste of money and by all accounts Tom Hooper had no idea what he was doing. Mocap artists need little dots to create digital effects based on human movement? Fuck that. My actors must be UNENCUMBERED! As they do dances that only one of them is trained to perform Twitter isn't like a unified voice but it's funny that the last minute Sonic the Hedgehog redesign engendered a level of sympathy for the animators that was forgotten because people liked the movie for some reason. This turd never got that love ever and a lot of people lost their jobs after it was done. Can I prove the studio cut the budget after a disaster of a trailer? No, but it's plausible. Dude in the article even says they had more time for the trailer than the feature
To be clear, I'm not asking you to prove anything - I'm asking if you've got anything to read because the inside baseball on this sort of clusterfuck is always entertaining. I was on a forum for screenwriters where for a few shining hours one of the editors on Superman Returns decided to vomit out about 3000 words on what working with Bryan Singer was like. I wish to god I'd copied it down.
I would deep link to it but it's a pain in the ass. It was a lot of allegedlys to cover the ass of the youtuber and her source anyway. I assume it's gonna come out in an article like this one when someone gets bored during quarantine or something. It was so heavily couched there's no reason to doubt it. Or maybe the animator or producer or whoever will move forward and put this behind them. Hope they go on an bitter Cats media leak tour but who knows