Mouse Hunt

DreamWorks released Mouse Hunt on December 19, 1997, from an Adam Rifkin script, and handed it to Gore Verbinski, a music-video and commercials director with four Clio Awards and a Cannes Silver Lion for the Budweiser frogs. It was his feature debut. Nathan Lane and Lee Evans play Ernie and Lars Smuntz, brothers who inherit a string factory and a Victorian mansion from their father, played by William Hickey, who died on June 29, 1997, shortly before shooting wrapped. The mansion turns out to be a valuable architectural design; the mouse turns out to be smarter than both of them. Christopher Walken plays Caesar, the exterminator.

The mouse was three mice at once: real trained animals supplied by trainer Boone Narr, a CGI mouse from Rhythm & Hues, and animatronics from Stan Winston Studio. Narr's team fielded more than 8,000 mouse submissions and used 60 on the shoot, one principal and 59 stunt performers, and some scenes needed as many as 130 takes. Filming ran from March 3 to July 3, 1997, around California, from Fresno and the Yosemite region to Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, on a $38 million budget, with Alan Silvestri scoring.

It opened fourth with $6.1 million and kept going, to $61.9 million in North America and more than $120 million worldwide. Critics split down the middle: Rotten Tomatoes has it at 50 percent, Roger Ebert found it "not very funny," Gene Siskel disagreed and liked it, and Janet Maslin in The New York Times called it "the family film least insulting to its audience's intelligence." Variety's Joe Leydon called the script "clever" and the two leads' "give-and-take" the "most special effect."

Its afterlife was on cable, where Cartoon Network ran it from March 2007 through 2009, and on disc, with a Blu-ray in 2021 and a 4K release in 2025. Verbinski went on to The Ring, the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films and an Oscar for Rango.