In 2003, DreamWorks released a live-action cinematic adaptation of “The Cat in the Hat”. There were no survivors. Aside from killing the careers of everyone involved, the film only served to prove that the crass and overstuffed live-action “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” adaptation was a terrible mistake that somehow got lucky.
After that catastrophe, Audrey Geisel decreed that nobody would ever be allowed to make another live-action adaptation of her late husband’s work for as long as she would live. And even after her death in 2018, nobody has ever dared to release another live-action attempt at adapting Dr. Seuss. Twenty years later, we’ve had three animated films, plus a “Green Eggs and Ham” Netflix animated series that somehow made it to two goddamn seasons, none of which ever came anywhere close to doing the source material justice. And nobody ever had the audacity to take another crack at Seuss’ flagship character. Until now.
The Cat in the Hat (2026) comes to us from Warner Bros. Animation, who have rallied in a big way post-COVID. That right there is an immediate upgrade from the cynical juvenile dolts at Illumination. Oh, and it’s Bill Hader voicing the Cat in the Hat, so they picked a legitimate comedian and a seasoned voice actor instead of going straight for the biggest possible name.
Too bad it still wasn’t enough.
In this adaptation, the Cat in the Hat is one of many anthropomorphic animals with striped accessories, working for some sprawling underground secret conglomerate that sends their agents to cheer kids up when they’re sad or bored. Right off the bat, I have questions. Like, for instance, what the fuck is this shit?!
What we’ve got here is a classic case of filmmakers going out of their way to aggressively answer questions that nobody cared to ask in the first place, with the side effect of opening up a hundred new questions in the process. (The Disney live-action remakes are notorious for this.) In the book, nobody needed to know why the Cat in the Hat showed up out of nowhere. He simply shows up wherever he pleases, that’s his deal. But now he’s out on assignments and there are hundreds of others doing his same job and this massive underground network is somehow a secret and is anyone making money off of this somehow, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!
This conceit doesn’t just break the movie’s plot, it also runs entirely counter to the story’s themes. Again, the Cat in the Hat is fundamentally a trickster. He’s the embodiment of childhood chaos. And now he’s taking orders and assignments from some kind of organization. And by introducing a massive sprawling workforce of anthropomorphic animal characters who have the Cat in the Hat’s gimmick and do what he does, it inherently makes the central character less unique and special. This is pathetic.
Oh, but the Cat in the Hat has a reputation as a renegade within the company. He gets results in terms of making kids happy, but those results come with serious collateral damage. In his defense, the Cat in the Hat argues that kids nowadays have become so jaded and inert, he has to take more extreme measures to distract kids from their cell phones. This issue is only raised in the prologue and dropped two minutes later.
The bottom line is that the Cat in the Hat is given one last impossible assignment, with the threat of getting fired if he doesn’t get it done and done cleanly. Trouble is, his boss (Mr. Hoogeboom, voiced by Giancarlo Esposito) is pathologically obsessed with getting the Cat in the Hat gone. Thus he uses reverse psychology to direct the Cat in the Hat to a super-secret and highly contraband device: The Go-Backer, which allows the user to rewind time.
Which means that the Cat in the Hat can cause all the mess he wants, so long as he remembers to reverse time so the mess never happens. But he’s blissfully ignorant of how excessive use will cause the Go-Backer to literally tear apart space-time. Moreover, opening up the Go-Backer woke up a monster locked away in the company basement, which breaks out on a single-minded mission to take the Go-Backer.
There’s so much to deal with here, I got a migraine just from typing all of that.
See, from a storytelling perspective, I get why these choices were made. Our protagonist needs personal stakes, so there’s the threat of getting fired. The protagonist needs conflict, so it’s him against his boss. The climax needs a big scary monster for a huge action set piece, so here’s a monster. And we get a MacGuffin to drive the plot forward, that’s textbook.
The problem is that even with all of this extraneous bullshit put in place simply to make the plot functional, the plot still sucks.
First of all, the antagonists are boring as hell. The monster has no motivation whatsoever, and Mr. Hoogeboom is literally two-dimensional. What’s worse, Hoogeboom wants the Cat in the Hat gone because he makes too much of a destructive mess, so his big plan is to get the Cat in the Hat fired by knowingly destroying the fabric of space-time itself. Even a grade-schooler would call bullshit.
Most times, the film can’t even commit to its own themes and ideas. Case in point: The central plot device is a freaking time machine, and the characters outright address the causality problems that could potentially destroy the universe if such a device was used improperly… which is why the film barely uses it or discusses it at all. The Go-Backer is almost immediately lost, and our characters have to spend the rest of the movie searching for it. I’m honestly kind of impressed how the filmmakers fell ass-backwards into covering up their own plot issues with such a half-baked act of cowardice.
But my favorite example concerns the Cat in the Hat, when he finally comes face to face with the consequences of the chaos left in his wake. When he realizes that the kids and parents and neighbors will all have to live with the collateral damage long after he’s washed his hands of the mess he created. It’s a neat thought… until five minutes later, when we get a big revelation to show that it was all a big misunderstanding and the Cat in the Hat was at no fault whatsoever. Chickenshit.
At this point, I expect I’ve gone long enough without bringing up the kid at the center of all this. Meet Gabby (Xochitl Gomez), who’s pissed off because her family (with America Ferrera and Tiago Martinez respectively playing her mom and her kid brother) are freshly moved into a new apartment. And we can plainly see for ourselves that this kid will make up any excuse at all to be miserable. Yes, I get that moving away to a new school and trying to find new friends can be an awful experience. Yes, of course Gabby’s development arc is all about being more open-minded and looking ahead to the future instead of wallowing in the past. But when it comes to characters who actively and deliberately make things worse than they have to be for no reason at all, my patience gets exhausted pretty much immediately.
It doesn’t help that the supporting characters around Gabby are all wretched. Her little brother is one-dimensional to the point of pathetically boring. Paula Pell voices the landlord, an unfunny and ineffectual Karen archetype who does basically zilch. I don’t even want to discuss the numbered Things.
Then we have Waffles, the goldfish here voiced by Matt Berry. In yet another example of fixing the source material until it’s broken, it’s shown that this particular goldfish is able to talk as a side effect of the Cat in the Hat’s magic (for lack of a better word). This flies entirely counter to the fish’s role in the source material — the goldfish can hardly serve as the sensible voice of rational authority after he’s been magically turned into a talking goldfish. Yet the filmmakers try to have it both ways, presenting Waffles as a stick-in-the-mud who gradually softens, and it flat doesn’t work because he can’t condemn the Cat in the Hat while he’s also benefiting from the Cat in the Hat’s magic!
Also, the fish is voiced by Laszlo Fucking Cravensworth. Even and especially when Berry reads a line with that charismatic gravitas, he makes it sound funny. That’s his deal. That’s not to say he can’t be deathly serious when he needs to be, but in a freaking Dr. Seuss movie? No way in hell.
No, The Cat in the Hat (2026) is not as bad as the 2003 attempt. I would’ve been more impressed if it somehow was. As it is, the filmmakers clearly have their hearts in the right place, with a fundamental understanding of why the Cat in the Hat matters and why we still need the character. The film makes a compelling case for finding a healthy balance of playtime and responsibility, why some rules are arbitrary bullshit, and why making destructive mistakes are an important part of childhood. If anything, by putting so much effort into doing Dr. Seuss’ most iconic character justice and trying to outrun Bo Welch’s shadow, these filmmakers were trying way, WAY too hard. There are so many ideas and messages crammed in here that nothing has the time and space to develop in any meaningful way.
The big problem is that by its very nature, the source material keeps actively resisting all efforts at adaptation into a functional feature-length story. In fact, the filmmakers’ choices were all consistently the necessary moves in theory, and only served to make everything worse in practice. Because Dr. Seuss built his stories from the ground up to serve as quick and easy children’s books, and they work so perfectly in that medium that they could never work as well in any longer-form style.
It’s been over 25 years since Jim Carrey burned his green makeup, folks. We need to call it. I get the temptation to try and adapt Dr. Seuss into a cinematic format, or anything longer than a TV movie, but we’ve tried every which way. It’s not working. It’s never going to work. We need to move on.
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About Author
I wholeheartedly agree with the last two paragraphs. I’ve been saying for years that expanding Dr. Seuss stories to feature length just doesn’t work. The best adaptations of Dr. Seuss that I’ve seen are the animated versions that don’t really go over 28 minutes, such as the classic holiday special “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” where Dr. Seuss himself collaborated with animation legend Chuck Jones.
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I even did a blog post about the subject years ago, and I stand by what I said in it. Most people generally seem to agree with me, though some say the Horton Hears a Who adaptation wasn’t so bad.
https://www.manic-expression.com/2022/08/15/wijdw-feature-length-dr-seuss-adaptations-2022-edition/