Warner's Cat in the Hat is tracking below the Mike Myers version everyone hated

Warner Bros.' animated The Cat in the Hat opens November 6, and the presale picture is grim. On r/boxoffice, EmpireCity Box Office's latest update points to an opening around $15 million — down from Box Office Theory's $25–35 million range just four weeks ago, with the tracker-thread verdict on presales sitting at "looks dire."

Here's the comparison that stings. The 2003 live-action Cat in the Hat — Mike Myers in prosthetics, 10% on Rotten Tomatoes), a 19 on Metacritic, a film so disliked that Audrey Geisel reportedly banned further live-action Seuss adaptations for the rest of her life — opened to $38.3 million and won its weekend. The new one is a G-rated animated film with Bill Hader, Quinta Brunson and America Ferrera in the booth, and it's tracking at well under half that number before inflation even enters the math.

The 2003 Cat in the Hat was hated hard enough that the Seuss estate banned live-action adaptations. Its cartoon replacement is tracking below half its opening.

Seuss without the Seuss

The trailer did its own damage. One r/boxoffice commenter who caught it before Clayface described the reaction of someone who grew up on the books:

"Genuinely was appalling to me. Seems to have no understanding of the source material whatsoever... and not even a single solitary rhyme."

— a commenter on r/boxoffice

That detail deserves to sit for a second: a Dr. Seuss movie marketed without a single rhyme. The books survive on exactly two things, the anarchy and the meter, and the campaign shows plenty of chaos jokes — an HR department for cats, a psychic narwhal — while skipping the thing a parent would actually recognize as Seuss. Those parents are the ticket buyers, and the presales suggest they noticed.

For Warner, the timing compounds it. The studio's 2026 has already produced Clayface's soft opening and Klara and the Sun's collapse, and this was the film positioned to launch a whole "Seussiverse," with a Thing One and Thing Two spin-off and Oh, the Places You'll Go! already dated for 2028. Franchise plans built on a $15 million opening tend not to survive contact with the first quarterly review.

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There's one more reason to care how this lands. Daffy Season, the seven-minute short carrying Eric Bauza's final theatrical Daffy Duck, is attached to this film — so the send-off for the voice of Looney Tunes is now also riding on how many people show up for a rhymeless Cat.

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