New Tom and Jerry movie in the works with Rashida Jones co-writing the script

Deadline reports that Warner Bros Pictures Animation is developing a brand-new Tom and Jerry movie, which will be written by Rashida Jones, Will McCormack, and Micahel Govier.

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera created the mischievous cat and mouse at MGM in 1940. Over the next two decades, they produced 114 shorts that won 7 Oscars. Others have revived the duo over the years with more shorts and a variety of TV shows. The characters most recently starred in the 2021 live-action/animated hybrid film Tom & Jerry, which received largely negative reviews and grossed $136 million worldwide.

This new Tom and Jerry movie will be starting fresh, which, considering the reaction to the last movie, is probably a good thing. Our own Matt Rooney really didn’t care for the 2021 film. “The premise – Tom and Jerry run amok in a hotel – is perfect for a several-minute segment in a series of cartoons, but for the movie, it’s a stretched out, mostly aimless exercise with a bevy of uninteresting humans having the impossible task of trying to pad it all out. Even the actors themselves seem to know they’re in the way, rushing through dialogue and letting jokes evaporate into thin air so the movie can get to what the people came for – elaborate pranks and shenanigans between a cartoon cat and mouse,” Rooney wrote. “It seems nitpicky to go to town on a children’s film. But being a children’s film doesn’t give you the license to be terrible. Maybe with more innovative minds behind the scenes, this could’ve been great. A big, colorful world could’ve been created for these two classic characters to play in, but instead, they get New York on an uneventful Tuesday afternoon. My problem isn’t that it’s never funny; sometimes it can be. It’s just that when it’s not, it’s painfully dull and uninspired. Parents will get tired of the nostalgia after ten minutes, and kids will likely run to the other room when the cat and mouse aren’t on screen.” You can check out the rest of his review right here.

How do you feel about a new Tom and Jerry movie? What can it do to correct the mistakes of the last one?