Name: Cats in the Museum 2: Treasures of Egypt
Director: Vasily Rovensky
Genre: Animation, Family, Adventure
Released: 2026-09-24T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 90 min
Cast: Roman Kurtsyn, Daria Blokhina, Snezhana Samokhina, Diomid Vinogradov

The most revealing thing about Cats in the Museum 2: Treasures of Egypt is not on the screen. It is on the release calendar. A Russian animation studio has taken a talking-cat franchise built around the Hermitage and walked it into cinemas across Mexico, Brazil, the Gulf states and Southeast Asia, territories where a mid-budget family film can still open without a Hollywood machine behind it and without the political friction that now shadows most Russian cultural exports.

The film itself is exactly what the title promises. Two of the museum’s cats, Vincent and Cleopatra, and a mouse named Maurice leave St. Petersburg for Egypt in pursuit of a legend about a genie who grants a single wish once every thousand years. There are pyramids, hidden chambers, an ancient map and a litter of new characters engineered for the sequel. It is aimed squarely at children and the adults buying the tickets, and it makes no pretence otherwise.

The casting says what kind of film this wants to be, though not in the usual way. In the original Russian, the voices belong to domestic television and comedy names: Roman Kurtsyn, Daria Blokhina, Snezhana Samokhina and Diomid Vinogradov. Yet almost no one in the film’s actual target markets will hear them. Cats in the Museum 2 is built to be dubbed, and dubbed quickly, into Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and half a dozen other languages. That is the strategic core of the property: its appeal is designed to survive translation, because translation is the entire business model.

Behind it is Vasily Rovensky, one of the more prolific figures in Russia’s export-minded animation sector. He directed the first Cats in the Museum, and his output, from the Big Trip series to a revisionist Pinocchio and a steady run of fairy-tale and talking-animal features, reads less like a personal filmography than a catalogue built for licensing and foreign sales. Rovensky co-wrote this sequel with Elvira Bushtets and Fedor Derevyansky, and the result is efficient rather than ambitious, a house style tuned to move product across borders.

Russian animation has one genuine export success to point to, and everyone in the business knows it. Masha and the Bear turned a domestic children’s series into a global licensing machine, proof that a Russian family property can travel far past its home market when it is built to be dubbed and merchandised rather than exported as culture. The Cats in the Museum films chase the same logic on a smaller scale: apolitical, character-driven, easy to localise, and aimed at an audience too young to ask where a cartoon was made. That is the opportunity and also the ceiling, because the Hermitage cats are not Masha, and a treasure hunt in Egypt is a long way from a household name.

What the Egypt setting buys the film is universality. A museum in St. Petersburg is a specific, faintly esoteric hook; a treasure hunt through pyramids is not. By relocating the sequel to a place every child recognises from picture books, the studio trades away the first film’s one distinctive idea, cats guarding a great museum, for something more generic but far more exportable. The genie’s single wish, fought over by characters who each want something different, supplies the plot’s engine. It is not a new engine.

None of this guarantees the film travels. The property carries almost no brand recognition beyond Russia and a few neighbouring markets, and audiences in Mexico or Brazil are meeting these cats for the first time, with no nostalgia to sell against. Early interest looks thin, the ambitions are modest by design, and family animation without a familiar label remains one of the hardest sells in any territory. A sturdy distribution map is not the same as demand. Whether these cats mean anything to a child who has never been near the Hermitage is the one question the release calendar cannot answer.

A scene from Cats in the Museum 2 Treasures of Egypt — The cats of the Hermitage in *Cats in the Museum 2: Treasures of Egypt* (2026)

Cats in the Museum 2: Treasures of Egypt runs 90 minutes and is produced by Licensing Brands with the Cinema Foundation of Russia. Rovensky directs from a script he wrote with Bushtets and Derevyansky, over a score by Anton Gryzlov. The Russian-language voice cast is led by Kurtsyn, Blokhina, Samokhina and Vinogradov, with each territory carrying its own dubbed version. It is the second entry in a franchise that began with the Hermitage-set original.

The sequel opened first in Russia and Kazakhstan in the spring, then moved through Vietnam, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Taiwan over the following months. It reaches audiences in the Gulf on September 10, Brazilian cinemas on September 17 and Mexican theatres on September 24. No United States or United Kingdom release has been announced, and no Spanish theatrical date is confirmed, a pattern that says as much about the current market for Russian cinema as any review could. For a story about cats guarding treasure, the more telling treasure map is the one that shows where the film is still allowed to open.