One of the Worst Movies Ever Just Hit Peacock (And There’s a New Adaptation on the Way)

It takes a lot for a movie to be dubbed “worst movie ever,” but one movie that should have never made it to the screen in 2003 absolutely deserves that title, and it’s now streaming. As Peacock began to update its content catalog for November, it added a disastrous critical flop. The movie is now streaming on the NBCUniversal streaming service as another adaptation of the source material prepares to hit theaters in just a few months.

Holding just a 9% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, Bo Welch’s 2003 directorial debut, Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, is, simply put, a terrible movie – and it’s now streaming on Peacock as of November 1st. The live-action film is based on Dr. Seuss’ iconic 1957 children’s book of the same name and centers around the trouble-making character after he arrives at the home of the young Conrad and Sally, flipping their boredom into fun and leaving destruction in his wake. The movie, which stars Mike Myers, Dakota Fanning, and Spencer Breslin, was so disastrous that it won a Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Excuse for an Actual Movie (All Concept/No Content) and also Worst Picture at the Stinkers Bad Movie Awards.

Is Dr. Seuss’ the Cat in the Hat Really That Bad?

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“Worst movie ever” may seem hyperbolic, but in the case of The Cat in the Hat, it’s not. The film completely stripped all of the whimsy of Dr. Seuss’s work in favor of a film packed with crude and juvenile humor, including adult innuendos and potty humor, and a story that hardly resembled its source material, adding subplots and characters that never existed in the book. We also can’t talk about the movie without mentioning the nightmarish character design of Myers’ titular character, an extremely unsettling creature brought to life with disproportionate features that completely missed the whimsical mark and instead achieved a creepy status.

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There is a bright spot to all that negativity: Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat has gained infamy due to its poor reception, making it one of those films that you need to watch at least once just to understand how awful it actually is. The movie was so bad, in fact, that it led Dr. Seuss’s widow, Audrey Geisel, to ban any future live-action adaptations of her husband’s work, which explains why the upcoming adaptation of the book starring Bill Hader as the titular character is an animated movie. That movie, which is scheduled to hit theaters Feb. 27, 2026, already looks like a more promising adaptation of the famed author’s beloved book.

What’s New on Peacock?

If you’d prefer to not subject yourself to Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat, there are plenty of other great streaming options on Peacock this November. On the family movie front, Peacock is now home to films like Dr. Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas, The Croods, Despicable Me, Despicable Me 2, and Paddington. Other movies now streaming include several Fast & Furious movies, the Men in Black movies, and the original Jurassic Park trilogy.

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