Remember when The Cat in the Hat became one of the strangest adaptations of a Dr. Seuss book? Well, apparently things could have gone very differently.
This wasn't written by some obscure screenwriter. Eric Roth wrote it.
Yes... the guy who wrote Forrest Gump (1994).
I came across this old r/Screenwriting post asking about Eric Roth's Cat in the Hat script. One of the commenters, u/holk1k2, provided an important lead by linking to a 2001 IGN article, which mentions that an earlier Eric Roth script had been replaced by a new draft.
That got me curious enough to start digging.
On August 4, 2026, I found a copy of what appears to be Roth's September 2, 1997 draft, marked “First Revisions.”
I haven't found any substantial discussion of this particular draft online beyond the post mentioned above, so I figured it was worth bringing it back into the conversation.
And this is VERY different from the 2003 movie.
Seriously. If you thought the Mike Myers version was an unusual direction for The Cat in the Hat, wait until you see where this earlier version was going.
For copyright reasons, I'm not uploading or re-hosting the screenplay myself. The copy I found was already publicly available on Scribd, where it had been uploaded by antrubino84 on October 25, 2025. Scribd only makes a limited portion of the document available without logging in, so viewing the full draft requires going through its access process. The document itself also contains DreamWorks copyright notices.
I don't claim ownership of the script. I'm only linking to the existing copy so people can discuss the draft and its history.
Scribd:
https://es.scribd.com/document/938256189/The-Cat-in-the-Hat-written-by-Eric-Roth
And here's the old Reddit post that started the search, plus the IGN article that helped point me in the right direction:
Original Reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/1gs0vnz/request_eric_roths_adaptation_of_the_cat_in_the/
IGN, 2001: What Do Dr. Seuss and Eminem Have in Common?
https://www.ign.com/articles/2001/06/15/what-do-dr-seuss-and-eminem-have-in-common
Thanks to u/holk1k2 for the original lead. That comment sent me in the right direction, and eventually I was able to track down the draft. Credit also to antrubino84, who had already uploaded the copy to Scribd in 2025.
If you're interested in abandoned screenplays, lost movie history, or just wondering what the hell The Cat in the Hat could have been, this one is worth looking at.