Will JD Vance provide a surprising boost to CatVideoFest this year?
Trump campaign limits damage after JD Vance remarks about 'childless cat ladies'
“There’s a reason why any mention of cats or cat ladies or anything like that is so popular. Because it’s like a hidden army online. Until you scare them off,” says Will Braden, founder and curator of the annual compilation, which opens in theaters today.
So he’s not shy about using a little tongue-in-cheek marketing after the Internet exploded over comments from the Republican VP candidate calling prominent Democratic women miserable, childless cat ladies. Braden recently posted a famous Hollywood photo from 1961 of a line of women, each carrying a black cat on a leash (they were auditioning the cats for a horror film), with the caption “2024 Voting Lines.” It’s the most-viewed post ever on the CatVideoFest site. The timing was “absolutely perfect.”
The annual video event formally launched in 2019 with Oscilloscope handling distribution and finding an audience, and last year grossed more than $600,000 at independent theaters from the Alamo Drafthouses to the IFC Center to the Music Box in Chicago. It opens this weekend and rolls out to about 200 locations total through September.
