Dr. Seuss didn't need a multiverse. Warner Bros.' The Cat in the Hat got one anyway

The Cat in the Hat that opened November 6 is an employee. In Warner Bros. Animation's version, Bill Hader's Cat works for the Institution of Imagination and Inspiration, carries a company gadget called the Go-Backer that can undo his messes, and takes one last assignment to save his standing with his bosses.

The villain, per Plugged In's plot rundown, is a creature called Something — a corrupted Thing whose obsession with reliving the past turned it into a jagged-toothed beast that could "tear apart the fabric of the universe" if it gets the device. There are magical boxes opening into pocket dimensions. There is a sentient fish.

None of this is in the book, because the book is 236 distinct words about a cat who shows up on a rainy day and wrecks a living room for fun. Dr. Seuss built the character on exactly one engine: chaos with no motive beyond the joy of it. Give the Cat an employer, a quota and a redemption arc, and you've deleted the character while keeping the hat.

Seuss wrote the book with 236 words. The movie needed a universe-ending villain.

One viewer's inventory on r/boxoffice reads like satire and is, per the reviews, simply accurate:

"Generic-ass script, too. Why the fuck does Dr. Seuss need a fantasy corpo, childhood trauma, and a smoke demon that eats all worlds in the multiverse, including ours? This is all in the movie, folks!"

The audience checked out before opening day

The numbers say families smelled it. Previews brought in about $1 million — less than half of what The Grinch did in previews in 2018 on its way to a $67.5 million opening — against an $86 million net budget. Critics split almost exactly down the middle: 45% on Rotten Tomatoes, with Variety's review title doing the autopsy in one line — "Like an Overstuffed Marvel Movie for Tots."

That Variety title is the story. The lore-heavy, universe-stakes template has been losing money all year in its home genre, and Hollywood's response was to install it in a picture book for preschoolers. A 1,600-word rainy-day story now has a mythology, a corporation and an apocalypse, and the only thing it lost on the way was the reason anyone loved the cat.

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There's one more cost, which I wrote about on October 26: Daffy Season, the first theatrical Looney Tunes short in 14 years and one of the late Eric Bauza's final Daffy Duck performances, is attached to this film. The send-off for the voice of Looney Tunes is now playing in front of a movie whose Thursday audience fit into a million dollars.

Previously we wrote: Live-action Moana just lost on Disney+ to Snow White — the remake everyone agreed was a disaster