Were we wrong about 'The Cat in the Hat'? Reexamining the movie that ruined Mike Myers's career.

Talk about a major furball. 20 years ago, Mike Myers went full feline in Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat, a live-action adaptation of Theodor Geisel's still-beloved 1957 children's book. At the time, the former Saturday Night Live player was one of the biggest movie stars around, juggling two franchise behemoths — New Line's Austin Powers trilogy and DreamWorks's Shrek series. After his fellow Canadian-born comic A-lister Jim Carrey raked in the green for his starring role in How the Grinch Stole Christmas, it only made sense for Myers to try his luck at headlining one of the good doctor's stories.

And he certainly suffered for his art. Buried under layers of angora and hair taken from humans — not cats — Myers had to resort to an in-costume cooling system to stay chill between takes. Tempers ran hot on the set as well. Speaking with The A.V. Club in 2016, Cat in the Hat supporting player Amy Hill called the shoot a "nightmarish experience" due in large part to Myers's working methods and extreme isolation from the rest of the cast and crew. "He would come in and, I guess, be in hair and makeup," Hill recalled. "I’d be there at the crack of dawn, waiting. We would all be waiting for Mike Myers to come."

As the saying goes, curiosity killed this cat. Released on Nov. 21, 2003, The Cat in the Hat was received more like a horror movie than a family comedy. Critics used words like "repulsive" and "ugly" in their myriad pans — the film holds a 10% score on Rotten Tomatoes — and audiences were similarly rubbed the wrong way based on the B-minus CinemaScore. While the movie did eventually eke out $133 million worldwide, that was less than half of the Grinch's $385 million global gross.

Fortunately, Myers still had Shrek in his corner, but The Cat in the Hat put his live-action career on paws... uh, pause. Five years would elapse before he was the main attraction in another non-animated feature film, 2008's equally disastrous The Love Guru. That one-two punch seemed to effectively end his career as a leading man; while Myers has popped up in everything from Inglourious Basterds to Bohemian Rhapsody — and had his own short-lived Netflix series, 2022's The Pentaverate — it's been 15 years since he's had a starring role in a major motion picture

Two decades later, though, is The Cat in the Hat really as bad as all that? We ran back the film that claimed one of Mike Myers's nine lives and assembled this list of pros and cons... well, mostly cons.

PRO: It's short — very short

In book form, The Cat in the Hat runs a trim 61 pages. In bringing the movie to the screen, director Bo Welch and the trio of credited screenwriters — Silicon Valley's Alec Berg, Veep's Dave Mandel and Curb Your Enthusiasm's Jeff Schaffer — wisely opted for brevity, keeping the movie at an ultra-brief 75 minutes, or 82 with credits. That's a full 40 minutes shorter than Carrey's live-action Grinch picture, which wears out its welcome after the first half-hour. You'll be tired of Cat in the Hat about 20 minutes in, but the good news is that you'll only have an hour to go.

Con: It's creepy — very creepy

Before stepping behind the camera to direct The Cat in the Hat, Welch got his start production designer on a formative trio of Tim Burton pictures: Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns. Those films are the poster children for "good creepy" — movies that traffic in the dark and macabre, but always with a full heart and clear-eyed sense of tone. The Cat in the Hat falls in the "bad creepy" camp, where the intention behind every creative choice seems whimsical and fun, but the end result is strained and unnerving. Case in point: Thing 1 and Thing 2, the cat's troublemaking pals whose stiff, unmoving faces are pure nightmare fuel. And then there are the cringey-creepy gags about plumber's cracks and the Cat's attraction to Kelly Preston and Paris Hilton that feel like stray outtakes from the R-rated version of the script.

Pro: Dakota and Spencer do their best...

Spencer Breslin and Dakota Fanning were 11 and 9, respectively, when they were shoved onto a series of soundstages populated by day-glo colors and a cat-suited Myers. That's an overwhelming environment for even the most well-adjusted kids and the duo admirably keep level heads amid the visual and verbal chaos. For the most part, they're simply tasked with reacting to Myers doing his schtick, and since all three are only occasionally in the same shot together, there's a strong chance that they filmed said reaction shots while their co-star was busy in the make-up trailer. Now that they're grown up, Breslin and Fanning might be embarrassed about having been in this movie... but they don't have to be embarrassed about their performances in the movie.

Con: But Mike Myers overwhelms them — and everything else

Comedy is all about making big choices, and there's no question that Myers's performance as Dr. Seuss's furry feline flibbertigibbet is larger than life. Mixing a distinctly Mel Brooks-ian Borscht Belt vocal patter with his trademark Austin Powers face-scrunching, the actor makes himself the center of attention from the moment he enters the film, pulling focus from the other actors, the lavish sets and the barely there story. That's what he was hired to do, of course, but his relentless demand for the viewer's attention exhausts rather than entertains. Myers spends much of the move dead center in the frame performing directly to the camera and blocking out almost everything else around him. Even if you wanted to look somewhere else... you can't.

Pro and Con: It killed off live-action Dr. Seuss movies

To quote her late husband's own words, when Dr. Seuss's widow, Audrey Geisel, saw The Cat in the Hat, she did not like it. Not one little bit. And, for the record, she had been against Myers's casting from the start. "I never saw Austin Powers, but I knew 'Yeah, baby!’ and I didn't want 'Yeah, baby!’ at all," she told Today in 2004. Audrey Geisel — who died in 2018 — promptly declared Dr. Seuss off-limits for live-action adaptations, resulting in books like Horton Hears a Who! and The Lorax going the animated route instead. That's probably for the best based on how The Cat in the Hat turned out, but 20 years later, it feels like we're overdue for another attempt. Just imagine Greta Gerwig's Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Or Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen riffing on "Too Many Daves." And with James Cameron off exploring the oceans of Pandora, Christopher Nolan could take a deep dive into McElligot's Pool.

The Cat in the Hat is currently streaming on Peacock.