Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | December 17, 2025
Tis the season for festive entertainment. Everyone has their favourite Christmas movie and everyone has their favourite argument they have every year about which movies do and don’t count in this subgenre (yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie, case closed.) This holiday season, I’ve seen one film more dominant on and off the screen than most. Well, to be specific, I’ve seen one beloved IP overwhelm, but it’s all been distilled into one specific version of it. The Grinch is here, but there can be only one.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, Dr. Seuss’s 1957 children’s picture book is typical of his style: rhyming verse, nonsensical words, mischief blended with morality, and a heart-warming ending with a more pointedly political agenda than is often accepted. The eponymous Grinch is a hairy grouch who thinks the Christmas-loving residents of Whoville are annoying and noisy. He thinks that stealing all things festive from their homes on Christmas Eve will dampen their joy, but it turns out that Christmas is not about rampant commercialism, and so his heart grows three sizes as he realizes the magic of community. It’s a classic for a reason.
The Seuss estate was notoriously picky about adaptations of his work. For a long time, he declined practically every high-money offer. One exception was the 1966 animated special that featured Tony the Tiger himself singing ‘You’re a Man One, Mr. Grinch.’ After his death, Seuss’s widow Audrey Geisel was suddenly very excited about the prospect of a movie deal. She signed an offer to make a new Grinch movie in 1998, an especially lucrative one that gave her 4% of the box-office gross, 50% of merchandising revenue, and 70% of book tie-in profits. Audrey also wanted the Grinch to be played by a huge star. Director Ron Howard successfully pitched for the director job, and Jim Carrey, one of the highest-paid actors of his generation, was cast as the Grinch. And lo and behold, a new Grinch was born.
On the Carrey Scale, from Chapter 27 to Ace Ventura, The Grinch is in the upper echelons of pure unfettered Jim-ness. It’s a cavalcade of balletic flailing, weird voices, and gummy-faced gurning that often defies the limitations of the human form. Slathered under heavy make-up and an itchy yak hair suit that he compared to torture, Carrey goes full cartoon character. That was his shtick, after all, but usually he was playing weird animated lunatics in the real world. Here, he was in Whoville, a place with no straight lines and lots of fish-eye lenses. The uncanniness of translating Seussian design to live-action gave Carrey a whole new playground to riff in, and Howard was certainly happy to let him do so. That may explain why his voice sounds more like Sean Connery than Boris Karloff.
While Howard is stridently faithful to the Seuss aesthetic in terms of production design - and it really does look stunning - the narrative was greatly expanded on. It had to be. How else do you take a tightly constructed children’s picture book and get a feature film out of it? Cindy Lou Who, played by a pre-rockstar Taylor Momsen, becomes the moral centre of the tale, a little girl confused as to why everyone around her is obsessed with gifts and money but not the true magic of the season. She sees the Grinch as someone worth inviting into the fold, even if nobody, the Grinch himself, understands why. It’s certainly an interesting expansion of the narrative (and one that Howard himself pitched to Geisel.) Just don’t think about it too much.
The movie really has to bend over backward to have the book’s moral climax work. It spends so much time proving his newly added motivation correct. Yeah, the citizens of Whoville are materialistic jerks who seem borderline offended by the idea of finding joy in community over commodities. When the Grinch rants about how greedy and stupid the entire season is, he’s not wrong, and it’s a monologue that lands with far more potency than the heel-turn of Cindy Lou’s dad reminding Jeffrey Tambor’s screeching mayor of the true meaning of Christmas. Their unity in the face of hopelessness doesn’t feel as authentic as it does in the book, and the Grinch’s heart grows in spite of him never really being proven wrong. But hey, it’s a lesson to be learned and all that.
I think this is partly why Carrey’s Grinch has become the definitive version of the character for millennials and younger. Yes, nostalgia plays its part, but we also love an anti-hero with a good point. Aren’t you, too, so overwhelmed by the ceaseless cycle of spending money and turning the simplicity of Christmas into a competition of plastic tat? Who among us hasn’t balked at yet another year of forced joy being used to pressure you into buying stuff nobody wants, needs, or even particularly likes? I love gifting for my friends, but I hate being negged into it by corporate forces. The Grinch via Carrey has a distinctly Seussian politics to him. You just have to ignore how he inspired decades’ of merchandising that now clogs up every shelf in December.
All Grinches post-Carrey are either liberally borrowing from his performances or are trying their own thing then swiftly discarded by the public. Bless Benedict Cumberbatch, you didn’t even make a dent in our consciousness with the most recent animated version. Matthew Morrison’s version for the NBC ‘live’ musical of the stage show (unaffiliated with the Ron Howard movie) so shamelessly apes Carrey’s performance that I’m surprised he wasn’t sued for plagiarism. He even does a hacky Donald Trump impression in it! Go to Universal Studios during Christmas and it’s the Carrey version the performers are impersonating, heavy on the jokes and pop culture gags. All the pajamas and McDonald’s tie-in meals and merch is designed to echo Carrey more than the source material. Just being grinchy is one thing, but being grinchy with a purpose, and jokes, is more relatable.
Critics were mixed on How the Grinch Stole Christmas when it premiered, but audiences loved it, and it earned $349 million from a hefty $123 million budget. Carrey’s performance earned him a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor, and I get it. It’s the kind of comedic performance that would never get Oscar-nominated but probably should have (could you imagine if Carrey had beaten Russell Crowe for Best Actor in 2000?) But his legacy is unbeatable as a Christmas icon and defining figure in festive pop culture. Jim Carrey is the Grinch. Sorry, Boris Karloff.
