Bill Hader's 'Cat in the Hat' Hits Theaters With Critics Split

One top critic calls the animated Dr. Seuss film a Marvel movie for tots, and another calls it delightful and long overdue.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety's chief film critic, graded Bill Hader's animated "The Cat in the Hat" on the movie's own scale. He gave it about a 70 on the Mess-o-Meter, the gauge the film uses to dock the Cat at work when his chaos runs too high, according to his Nov. 3 review.

The same day, Deadline's chief film critic, Pete Hammond, called the Warner Bros. film delightful and long overdue. The surprise is how closely the two describe what's on screen. They split over what Dr. Seuss's book was in the first place.

We read the reviews from both trades' chief critics, the two that ran ahead of Friday's opening. Nobody at The Globe has seen the film, so every scene below is one a critic described, and the verdict at the end is theirs.

Hader, who's also an executive producer, voices a Cat with a day job. In Hammond's telling, he works for the Institute for the Institution of Imagination and Inspiration, and his assignment is to cheer up Gabby (Xochitl Gomez) and her little brother Sebastian (Tiago Martinez). The kids have just moved to a new city with their mom, Carmen (America Ferrera), and a talking goldfish, Waffles (Matt Berry). Each family member has a sealed moving box, and each box opens into another world.

From there, both critics say, the movie goes big. Gleiberman lists an undersea trip with a school of swimming underwear, an opera-singing whale, a marching band playing "Shake It Off" and a showdown with a monster called the Something. Hammond doesn't argue. He grants that it gets "a bit frenetic toward the finale," he wrote in Deadline.

The real fork is the 1957 book. Hammond called Seuss's original a "rather thin housebound story," a script problem that writer-directors Erica Rivinoja and Alessandro Carloni solved by giving the Cat a backstory. For Gleiberman, that smallness was the whole charm, and he says the movie races away from the book's innocent wildness to copy Pixar, the Minions and Marvel.

That fork runs through their views of the star. Both measure Hader against Mike Myers, whose live-action Cat in 2003 drew 10 Razzie nominations, Hammond noted. Gleiberman says Hader avoids Myers's mistakes but plays the Cat as so relentlessly friendly that it lets him down. Hammond calls the same voice work terrific, a Cat for a new generation. They're hearing the same performance and want different things from it.

The Things show the split most clearly. Gleiberman says the film adds a whole clan of them, throws in a joke about the Things getting their own franchise, and comes across as a plan to sell the next Minions. He found them "more cuddly than hilarious," he wrote. Hammond welcomed the Things' arrival and argues that the film comes back to Earth at the end with the heart that made the book last.

Word of mouth matters for this one. Variety's box-office desk projected a $20 million to $25 million opening from about 4,000 venues, far below the $67 million debut of 2018's "The Grinch." Variety reported that the film will need word of mouth and overseas audiences to justify its $92 million production budget.

The critics' verdict: They're split, though not as far apart as their headlines suggest. Both say the film is loud, crowded and fun in places. Hammond thinks the heart survives all that noise. Gleiberman says it delivers, but in a "hectic, bumptious, overcrowded and underfelt" way. If you thought the book was thin, Hammond's review is the one to trust. If you thought it was wild, go with Gleiberman's.

That leaves the Mess-o-Meter as the fairest judge. Both critics say the needle ran high, and they disagree only about whether the Cat deserves the write-up.

Source: Variety, retrieved November 6, 2026. Other sources: Deadline, Variety (2).