Hollywood loves few things more than mining a recognizable property for all that it’s worth, but Mike Myers’ The Cat in the Hat turned out to be so irredeemably awful that it led to a moratorium on any and all live-action adaptations of the Dr. Seuss back catalogue, which is the reason why every single one of the features to follow in its wake have been animated.
Even though it only runs for a mercifully brief 82 minutes, the infamous family-friendly assault on the senses did more than enough in that time to secure a reputation as one of the worst movies in the history of cinema, yielding 10 nominations at the Razzies to go along with its 10 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, with insult added to injury after the $109 million blockbuster tanked at the box office.
Incredibly, plans for a sequel were even afoot before The Cat in the Hat was unleashed onto an unsuspecting world, but even on its lonesome it proved horrendous enough for the rights-holders to step in. Following its embarrassing critical and commercial reception, Seuss’s widow Audrey Geisel actively prohibited her late husband’s works from even being considered for live-action, which is quite the step.
Can a solitary feature really be so bad as to outlaw an entire subgenre of cinema with the potential to earn money for any studio willing to take the plunge? As anyone who’s seen this monstrosity can attest, the answer is an unequivocal “yes.” And yet, because nothing is truly sacred anymore, FlixPatrol naming The Cat in the Hat as the number one most-watched title among Starz users in both the United States and United Kingdom has shown people are still actively subjecting themselves to it, which is nuts.