The Cat in the Hat doesn’t open until Friday, but the reviews are already shaping how the weekend looks. The embargo lifted Tuesday at noon ET, and the reaction split critics into two camps. The market reaction was just as sharp: Kalshi’s forecast for the film’s final Rotten Tomatoes score is still working through the aftershocks. The question prediction markets are asking now: should the Cat have stayed in the hat instead of heading to theaters?
The Cat in the Hat Rotten Tomatoes score today:
Rotten Tomatoes hasn’t certified an official Tomatometer score yet, the page still reads “Coming soon” as review counts climb, now past two dozen. What’s clear is that critics are genuinely split, with close to as many positive notices as negative ones so far. Metacritic shows a similar spread: an early Metascore of 47 from 11 critics, landing in “Mixed or Average” territory. Both figures are likely to keep moving before the film actually hits theaters.
What critics are saying: THR, Variety and AP vs. Awards Watch
The negative notices have been the loudest so far:
- The Hollywood Reporter’s Frank Scheck called it an improvement on the 2003 version but still “more taxing than enjoyable.”
- Variety’s Owen Gleiberman described it as “junior Marvel surrealism… a de facto video-game movie for a game that doesn’t exist.”
- The Associated Press’ Mark Kennedy wrote that it’s “what happens when lots and lots of money gets thrown at a movie with middling returns.”
Not every outlet agrees.
AwardsWatch gave the film 75 out of 100, with critic Jorge Tenreiro writing that it “is loud, unruly, and occasionally a little too pleased with its own chaos, but its good humor is hard to resist.” A few other reviewers landed closer to that camp, praising the animation’s visual range even where the story didn’t fully land for them.
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The Cat in the Hat vs. the 2003 Mike Myers film
This isn’t Hollywood’s first attempt at the character, and the last one still gets brought up as a cautionary tale. The 2003 live-action version holds an 11% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 59% audience score, with a consensus that reads: “Filled with double entendres and potty humor, this Cat falls flat.” It also picked up multiple Razzie nominations. The fallout followed Mike Myers for years: outside of the Shrek franchise, he barely took on another live-action lead role until Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018. While this new debut doesn’t look as catastrophic as that one from 2003, it’s far from a warm welcome.
None of that stopped it commercially. The film opened to $38.3 million after an $11.2 million first day, and finished with $134 million worldwide against a $109 million budget: a modest result, but proof that weak reviews don’t automatically sink a family release built around a recognizable name.
That history is part of why Warner Bros. keeps returning to the character, and why this animated reset, with Bill Hader voicing the Cat, was framed as a clean break from the live-action version. The reviews suggest that break only partly worked.
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The Cat in the Hat box office opening weekend projections
Industry tracking has the new film opening well below its predecessor. Variety’s latest estimate puts the opening weekend at $20 million to $25 million from roughly 4,000 theaters, a soft number next to the 2003 film’s $38.3 million debut.
The Cat also has to share the weekend with the giant "lizard" in Godzilla Minus Zero, tracking in a similar range, though critically, Godzilla it’s in a different league entirely, sitting at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.
A modest opening wouldn’t be unusual for Warner Bros. Animation’s first fully original release under this new label, but it does complicate the studio’s hope for a quick win after a rough year at the box office.
Can the score recover before Friday?
Kalshi’s forecast for the film’s final Rotten Tomatoes score tells its own version of this story. The contract held in the mid-to-high 60s through most of late October, then dropped sharply once reviews started posting Tuesday, bottoming out near 48%. Since then it has ticked back up to 50.2%, with more than $1 million traded on the market overall.
That small recovery lines up with the mixed-not-uniformly-bad shape of the reviews so far. More notices will post before Friday, and Rotten Tomatoes scores can still move in the final stretch before a wide release. Whether The Cat in the Hat keeps climbing back toward the mid-50s or slides again depends on which wave of reviews ends up carrying the week.
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