Harold and the Purple Crayon is a 2024 American fantasy comedy film directed by Carlos Saldanha (in his live-action feature-length directorial debut) from a screenplay by David Guion and Michael Handelman, based on the 1955 children's book by Crockett Johnson.

Combining live-action and animation, the film stars Zachary Levi, Lil Rel Howery, Benjamin Bottani, Jemaine Clement, Tanya Reynolds, Alfred Molina, and Zooey Deschanel.

After he draws himself off the book's pages and into the physical world, Harold finds that he has a lot to learn about real life.

His magic purple crayon can make anything come to life, including his friends Moose and Porcupine, whom he spends time with.

Terri, the mother of an imaginative boy named Mel, accidentally hits Harold and Moose with her car.

They acquired rights to other children's books, including Harold and the Purple Crayon, whose author, Crockett Johnson, was a mentor to Sendak.

[7][8][9][10][11] In February 2010, it was reported that Columbia Pictures, Sony Pictures Animation, Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, and Will Smith's Overbrook Entertainment were developing an animated film adaptation of Harold and the Purple Crayon, to be produced by Smith and James Lassiter and written by Josh Klausner.

[28] The full score was released on August 2, 2024, alongside an original single titled "Colors", performed by Boots Ottestad and Jordy Searcy, which plays during the film's closing credits.

[32] Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released the film on digital download on August 27,[33] and on Blu-ray and DVD on October 8.

Much like the Holmes attempt, Netflix refused, choosing to focus more on in-house projects and their distribution window deals at that time.

[36][37] The first teaser posters were released on March 13, 2024, confirming that Harold would be played by Levi and that the character, originally a child, would be portrayed as a grown man in the film.

[3][4] This ultimately meant the film failed to recover its reported $40 million budget, becoming a box office bomb.

Deadline Hollywood writer Anthony D'Alessandro suggested the reasons for the film's failure, besides its competitors and poor reviews, was the intellectual property in general being too old for most moviegoers, as well as too juvenile for most non-family audiences, leaving the film with a very small target audience; he further suggested it was also because the "low budget, zany-fantastical formula of old kids IP" that Sony Pictures had previously done with Peter Rabbit and Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, in his opinion, was considered "old hat" by audiences by that time.

In the United States and Canada, Harold and the Purple Crayon was released alongside Trap, and was projected to gross $5–6 million from 3,325 theaters in its opening weekend.

The website's consensus reads: "A high-concept treatment that misses out on the blissful simplicity of its source material, Harold and the Purple Crayon is a tribute to imagination that's content to only color inside the lines.

"[43] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 34 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable" reviews.