Mike Myers. Jim Carrey. Carriers of Dr. Seuss's book to movie multimodality.

I recently watched the movie The Cat In The Hat starring Mike Myers. The star of Austin Powers, Shrek, Wayne's World, and so on. I have also been thinking a lot lately about how books and movies target their audience to get the most followers. Also, the transformation from book into movie and how they morph the content to target to gather the following they desire. Mike Myers plays the Cat in The Cat in the Hat movie. Dressed up in a the cat costume, Mike plays multiple characters in the Cat in the Hat. Interestingly, the same as he did in the Austin Powers movies, i.e. Goldmember, Fat Bastard, Dr. Evil. It is a specific style that has to be written in from the early stages of production, written exclusively for the actor (also notable mention of this style: Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor).

While I do think Mike is funny and a good actor, I also believe that when converting the book into a movie, in order to target a broader (older than the classic book) audience, the writers and producers weighed the creation of the movie heavily on the lead actor to carry the role to approve to a broader audience. They used Mike Myer's already established range of a followers, people he gained previously that enjoyed his other roles such in Austin Powers (and other movies) where he played multiple characters with difference accents, characteristics and mannerisms. Continuing that style, they used it, Mike Myer's type of jokes among other content to broaden The Cat In The Hat so that it would appeal to viewers beyond the age of children that the book was targeted to. Granted, Dr. Seuss has a large following as well. Yet, I believe they would go see the movie regardless of who plays the characters.

To further my claim, we can look at other movies by Dr. Seuss that were converted into movies. How the Grinch Stole Christmas for example. (We can also use Horton Hears a Who! as well, that was made as a cartoon, but its the same idea). Jim Carrey is cast as the lead playing the Grinch. Jim has an even larger following than Mike does. Like previously mentioned, when the writers and producers created the movie from the book, the main importance in re-writing the story was to gather a larger, broader audience, and in way of doing this they first had to cast an actor that could carry the movie on his shoulders and the rest would fall in to place.

Main theme of this post: When converting book to movie, the main importance is casting (Finding the lead characters who can carry the movie). Second importance is writing around the found casting. Mike Myers and Jim Carrey both were large reasons to go see the re-made movies.

What do you think? Is casting actors for the characters in the book the first step and main importance of converting a book to a movie? Does Jim Carry and Mike Myers carry the movies on their shoulders? Without them would the Dr. Seuss remakes be flops or lesser?