The Cat in the Hat review: kids will love it, parents won't

Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat is a famously short book. Warner Bros. needed 107 minutes, a time machine and a monster to tell its version, and that's the trouble.

The Cat in the Hat, the first fully animated feature about Seuss's famous troublemaker, is colorful, fast and often funny, and young kids will probably have a blast. Everyone else gets a busy, overstuffed adventure that loses track of what made the book special. Our score: 5 out of 10.

Critics are split down the middle. It sits at 45% on Rotten Tomatoes from 53 reviews and 46 on Metacritic, but opening-night audiences gave it an A CinemaScore. That gap tells you exactly who this movie is for.

Bill Hader voices the Cat, who here works for a magical institute that sends creatures into homes to cheer up children. After one visit too many ends in chaos, he's on his final warning. His last job: two siblings, Gabby (Xochitl Gomez) and Sebastian (Tiago Martinez), who have just moved to a new town and hate it. When Gabby gets hold of a stopwatch that turns back time, and it disappears into a moving box the Cat's magic has turned into its own little world, things get out of hand fast.

Erica Rivinoja and Alessandro Carloni direct, with an $86 million budget and a voice cast stacked with comedy names: Matt Berry as a goldfish named Waffles, Quinta Brunson as Sherrie from HR, Bowen Yang as an intern, plus Giancarlo Esposito, America Ferrera, Paula Pell and Tituss Burgess. It's been a long road: the film was first due in 2024, then moved to early 2026, before landing in November.

Hader earns his hat

Start with the good news, because there is some. Hader is a smart choice for the Cat, and he plays him as more than a walking sugar rush. The A.V. Club's Jacob Oller, who gave the film a C, said Hader "plays this with restrained mania, sneaking in a few understated deliveries among the requisite yelling." ShowbizJunkies' Kevin Finnerty (B) went further, writing that his performance "raises the film to an even higher level of enjoyment."

The supporting cast gets laughs too, Berry most of all: his mannered goldfish is one of the film's best running jokes. And the look of the thing is genuinely inventive. The real-world scenes have the rounded, polished feel of a modern studio cartoon, but inside the magic boxes the animation shifts into a looser, more expressive style, and old paperwork and forgotten toys spring to life in ways that feel closest to Seuss's own drawings.

For its target audience, that may be all it needs. Finnerty called it "colorful, chaotic, and cute," and even its harshest critics concede it keeps little ones entertained. TheWrap's William Bibbiani said the film "excels at amusing youngsters, which is good."

Where the mess gets out of hand

The problem is everything around the Cat. The book is a small, anarchic story about two bored kids, a rainy day and a guest who wrecks the house. The film turns that into a workplace comedy, a time-travel caper and a race to save the universe, with a family drama about moving house stitched on top. Oller called it "a Ready Player One-style battlefield showdown," and he didn't mean it as praise.

Bibbiani was harsher, calling the film "so inoffensive it makes no impression at all." In his view, it recreates "some of the book's imagery and none of its charm." The Boston Globe's Odie Henderson gave it one and a half stars and found it "far more violent and scary than anything Dr. Seuss poured out from his pen," which parents of very small children should note.

The message is the other sticking point. Critics keep coming back to a third act that lands its lesson about family with a thud, after 100 minutes of noise. It's not that it's bad, exactly. It just feels like a brand doing its job, where the book felt like a rule being broken.

There's a lot riding on it. Warner Bros. has big plans for Seuss: Oh, the Places You'll Go! is set for March 2028, and a Cat in the Hat sequel is reportedly being weighed, depending on how this one does. Its opening weekend, projected at around $19 million behind Godzilla Minus Zero, won't settle that on its own.

So who should go? If you have kids under 10 and a rainy weekend to fill, The Cat in the Hat will do the job, and the A grade from audiences says families agree. It's rated PG, runs 1 hour 47 minutes and is in cinemas and IMAX now.

If you were hoping for the wild, rule-breaking spirit of the book, it's not here. Hader's Cat deserves a smaller, stranger movie than this one.