An episode of Hey Arnold predicted the negative reaction to the Cats movie

Cats was released in cinemas this week and is on course to be one of the biggest flops in movie history.

Tom Hooper's film, which has received dismal reviews, mostly for its terrible CGI, grossed just £5 million in North America and only reached £3.4m at the British and Irish box office, which is pretty embarrassing for a film starring Taylor Swift, Idris Elba, James Corden and Judi Dench with a £100m budget.

With that being said, it already appears that the film has found something of a cult following online with many people going to see it purely to laugh out how terrible it is. Literally, if you search for Cats on Twitter, you'll receive both lots of cute videos of the real-life critters and jokes about the movie.

In all honesty, we really shouldn't have been surprised at the negative reaction to the movie of Andrew Lloyd Webber's famed musical because Hey Arnold predicted it 22 years ago.

That's right the beloved 90s animated series about a young boy and his 'football-shaped head' knew that the movie would be a bust and that everyone would laugh at it.

In an episode called 'Quantity Time' which was aired in November 1997, Helga, who was the titular character's nemesis/secret admirer goes to see a parody of Cats, appropriately called 'Rats', with her father 'Big Bob.'

Much like modern-day cinemagoers, Helga and her dad watch Rats but proceed to laugh all the way through and even call it 'the stupidest thing I've ever seen.'

This niche piece of pop culture history reemerged on Twitter this weekend thanks to social media personality Jesse McClaren and people are here for it.

If you are tempted, we would recommend the entire clip from the episode.

More: Why 'Andrew Lloyd Webber is actually rubbish' became the internet's hot take of the year