Ready to go back to Whoville? One of the biggest family hits of the early 2000s may be getting a sequel, over 25 years later. According to a report in Variety, Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment are looking to make a sequel to How the Grinch Stole Christmas. This would see Jim Carrey returning as the titular Grinch, and Ron Howard returning to direct as well. The original film, an adaptation of the 1957 Dr. Seuss book, which also became an animated holiday classic, was one of the biggest hits of the year 2000, grossing $265 domestically. Which is a huge amount for that era.
If the sequel goes forward, which right now is not a done deal, it will have a script by Alec Berg, whose credits include Barry and Silicon Valley, along with Jeff Schaffer and David Mandel. These three writers all worked together on HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm. Although we can’t see how those Larry David vibes would fit in at all with anything Dr. Seuss, maybe they have a take that somehow justifies a part two. The original How the Grinch Stole Christmas feels like a very “one-and-done” modern fairy tale. So it’ll be interesting to see how they possibly make a sequel work.
When questioned about a sequel, Jim Carrey has said that he found the Grinch makeup a torturous process. It took them endless hours to put the prosthetics on. As recently as 2024, he told Comic Book “I do that with a ton of makeup and can hardly breathe. It was an extremely excruciating process. The children were in my mind all the time. ‘It’s for the kids. It’s for the kids.’ And now, with motion capture and things like that, I could be free to do other things.”
So, maybe technology has advanced enough that Carrey doesn’t need to go through hell to achieve Grinchness. We doubt it will look quite as good with mo-cap, but maybe they’ll surprise us. We’ll have to wait and see how this all shakes out.