‘The Cat In The Hat’ Opens To A Shrinking Forecast — And The Forecasters Don’t Agree

Warner Bros. Pictures Animation's The Cat in the Hat opens Friday in about 4,000 North American theatres, and the only thing the tracking industry agrees on is the direction: down. The forecasts, printed here unblended because they genuinely differ: Variety's tracking puts the opening at $20–25 million; Boxoffice Pro, reporting later on Thursday, puts it at $15–20 million and notes tracking "has been sinking into release week"; Box Office Theory puts it at $12–17 million.

The film is directed by Alessandro Carloni and Erica Rivinoja, with Bill Hader voicing the Cat, alongside Quinta Brunson, America Ferrera and Xochitl Gomez; its Sebastian and Gabby — played by Tiago Martinez and Gomez — move to a new home with their single mother Carmen. The reported production budget is approximately $92 million on Variety's figure and "nearly $100 million" on TheWrap's — reported, not studio-confirmed.

The Comparison Nobody Wanted

The benchmark is the 2003 live-action version with Mike Myers — a famous critical failure that nevertheless opened to $38.3 million on a $109 million budget. If the new film opens at even the top of Variety's range, it will have opened lower than the flop. If it opens at Boxoffice Pro's range or below, MovieWeb's arithmetic says it would be the lowest domestic opening for a major Dr. Seuss adaptation on record.

What Is Actually At Stake

The Cat in the Hat is the first theatrical release from Warner Bros. Pictures Animation under Bill Damaschke — the relaunch title of a division the studio is rebuilding. A soft opening for the relaunch, beaten on the same weekend by a subtitled Godzilla sequel, would set the terms of every story written about the division for a year. An opening above the forecasts rewrites it just as fast.

The honest position on Thursday night is the one the forecasters are in: three respectable trackers, three different numbers, all pointing down, on a film whose audience — families — is the least trackable in the business. Sunday's actuals will pick the winner of that argument too.

The disagreement between the trackers is itself information. Variety's range is the oldest of the three published; Boxoffice Pro's revision, issued later on Thursday with the explicit note that tracking "has been sinking into release week," reflects the most recent data; Box Office Theory's lower band agrees with the direction if not the depth. When pre-release tracking falls during release week, the usual causes are weak family pre-sales and soft awareness among parents — the audience that decides an animated opening — and neither is visible in the kind of social noise that can make a superhero film look healthier than it is.

None of this is a verdict. Family films are the least trackable segment in exhibition, walk-up business can rescue a soft Thursday by Saturday afternoon, and a 4,000-theatre release gives the film every chance to find its audience by word of mouth. But the division launching a new animation era at Warner Bros. needed the conversation this week to be about its movie. Instead it is about three numbers, all of them going down.

Sources: Variety tracking via MovieWeb and ComingSoon; Boxoffice Pro; Box Office Theory; Reuters (film details); TheWrap and Enstarz (budget reporting); Variety/Action Network (2003 benchmark).