Did you know there are actually 3 versions of the movie ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’ and 1 musical?
The live-action Christmas movie ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’, starring Jim Carrey as the Grinch, debuted in 2000, and grossed $260 million in the U.S. and Canada, and $85.1 million internationally, for a total of $345.1 million worldwide.
But the original cartoon version of ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’ was a TV special that aired on Sunday, December 18, 1966 on CBS, and has gone on to become a classic Christmas special.
The TV special version of ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’ was created after the surprise success of ‘A Charlie Brown Christmas’ a year before, and was given a big budget by MGM of $315,000 budget, which was a lot back then, and today would be the equivalent of $2,841,000.
Smelling Holiday gold, a couple of other spinoffs of the Grinch were rolled out, including a TV special called ‘Halloween Is Grinch Night’ that debuted on ABC in 1977, only 11 years after the original Christmas special. The plot is a little sketchy, but involves a tale of the Grinch coming down to haunt the Whos every Halloween. It was nowhere near as successful as the original version of ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’, but it did win an Emmy. Then, they tried their luck again with ‘The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat’, which was then retitled as ‘The Cat in the Hat Gets Grinched’, and that debuted on ABC in 1982 to lackluster reviews. Go figure.
This brings us to the most recent 2018 version entitled ‘The Grinch’, which is an animated Christmas comedy film produced by Illumination (you know, the company behind the Minions franchise. I won’t bore you with the plot, which lacked in creativity and pretty much stuck to the original version of ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’. What was most impressive about this new version ‘The Grinch’ was that it grossed over $526 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing Christmas film of all time, as well as the highest-grossing Dr. Seuss film adaptation, as in ever!
There’s also a ‘Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical’ on Broadway that debuted on November 8, 2006, but sadly it closed on January 7, 2007 before I could ever go see it. That hasn’t stopped them from taking the musical on tour across the country to a host of cities including Minneapolis, San Diego, Los Angeles, Providence, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, St. Louis and San Francisco. There was even an international tour to the United Kingdom in 2019.
Today ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas’ lives on in all of its marvelous reincarnations, and truly is a must-watch movie during the holiday season.
Where to Watch Every Grinch Movie This Holiday Season