"The Cat in the Hat" Opens Today — With Bill Hader in the Hat and a Forecast That Fell by Half

The other half of this weekend's fight opens today. The Cat in the Hat, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation's animated take on the 1957 Dr. Seuss book, reaches theaters Friday — written and directed by Alessandro Carloni and Erica Rivinoja, and built, as Reuters' opening-day report puts it, to expand "beyond the original 1957 book" rather than retell it. Our forecasts piece earlier this week tracked the strangest number attached to the film: the spread. Estimates for this opening have run from $17 million to $50 million depending on the model and the week. The freshest trade figure, from TheWrap's tracking report, is $20–22 million — against a reported budget of nearly $100 million, a gap the same report frames plainly. In October, Boxoffice Pro's long-range outlook had this film opening at $40–50 million and giving Warner Bros. its first $40 million opener of the year. The forecast didn't drift; it fell.

What the film actually is

Reuters, which covered the opening directly, lays out the construction. Bill Hader voices the Cat, who in this version gets a final chance to keep his job — cheering up two siblings who have just moved to a new home with their single mother: Gabby, voiced by Xochitl Gomez, and Sebastian, voiced by Tiago Martinez, with America Ferrera as their mother, Carmen. Matt Berry and Giancarlo Esposito round out the named cast. It's explicitly a different object from Universal's 2003 live-action version with Mike Myers — the comparison every parent in the audience will make anyway, and the one the filmmakers have been answering all week.

Rivinoja told Reuters the expansion was the assignment, not a side effect: "The book is actually quite small, and not very much happens… we were so excited that we got to expand that entire world." Hader said the filmmakers "brought my personality up," and credited their enthusiasm with shaping the film's upbeat tone. And Quinta Brunson — part of the voice cast — made the marketing argument in one line to Reuters: kids still read the book in schools and know the character by preschool or kindergarten, making the film "less of an introduction to the character than a new take on a beloved classic."

Why the weekend is unkind

TheWrap's report frames the film as the marker for Warner Bros.' return to theatrical animation — which is precisely why a $20–22 million opening against that reported budget reads as a problem rather than a shrug. The slot doesn't help: the same weekend belongs, on every forecast including the cautious ones, to a subtitled Godzilla film with IMAX screens and a $5.7 million first day already banked in Japan (see the companion piece). Family films can leg out — our sleeper-hit explainer, linked below, is a museum of animated slow burns — but they leg out from a base, and the base is what this weekend decides. The audited numbers land Sunday; this desk will grade the forecasts, including the ones quoted here, against them.