Tom and Jerry movie trailer is here…but honestly, why?

The Tom and Jerry movie trailer is here…

This year in movies hasn’t been great. It began with the strangeness that was Sonic the Hedgehog and then the lackluster Birds of Prey about wrapped it up for superheroes as the pandemic shut down theaters and everything everywhere. And the new Tom and Jerry movie trailer reveal fits that theme pretty well.

Honestly, this looks….not good. Sure, the cast and crew likely tried their best to salvage what they could, but sometimes it’s just live-action just doesn’t mesh with animation. For another thing, as much as Michael Jordan’s Space Jam is beloved, it isn’t a great movie, and neither is its sort-of-sequel Looney Tunes: Back in Action, which starred Brendan Fraser and Jenna Elfman (yep, Pam from The Office).

The Tom and Jerry movie takes place in New York City in an upscale hotel, as the shenanigans between the violent cat and mouse gradually escalate, while humans have problems of their own.

It stars Chloe Grace Moretz (Kick-***, The 5th Wave, 2019 The Addams Family) as human protagonist wedding planner/hotel employee Kayla, Michael Pena (Ant-Man, 12 Strong) as her boss Terrance, and Colin Jost (Saturday Night Live) as the groom. Ken Jeong (The Masked Singer) portrays a hotel chef.

Moretz has a small connection to pet-related movies already, as she voiced the younger version of Miley Cyrus’s main character of Penny in Bolt.

The Tom and Jerry movie will be directed by Tim Story, who was also behind the camera for a lot of rap/hip-hop music videos; his most known credits are the subpar first two Fantastic Four movies with Chris Evans and Jessica Alba, and a bizarre-sounding Queen Latifah-Jimmy Fallon police comedy called Taxi.

Tom and Jerry were created by Bill Hanna and Joseph Barbera around 1940 for MGM, about two decades before they launched their own animation studio that spawned a small galaxy of Saturday morning cartoon characters that include Huckleberry Hound and Scooby-Doo.

Tom and Jerry then briefly became even more popular than the Looney Tunes for a time, as Michael Barrier notes in his encyclopedic history Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age, even winning five Oscars during the 1940s.

Their shorts combined frenetic pacing and extreme slapstick violence into bite-sized adventures that didn’t aspire to high artistic pretentions, unlike some of their competitors (the Bugs/Elmer opera parodies, for example).

Because of their lack of story-driven plots, however, Tom and Jerry cartoons haven’t really held up over the years, and that looks to be doubly true for the Tom and Jerry movie trailer. Since the premise of the original cartoons is, as Barrier wrote, “very noisy,” full of loud special effects like glass breaking and explosions, and the characters “live to inflict violence upon each other,” this seems like a really unlikely formula to draw success in a feature-film format.

Especially given the increased real-world tensions of recent years and physical-based slapstick humor falling out of favor, this decision to create this film is puzzling.

Reception to the initial Tom and Jerry movie trailer was unenthusiastic, though Polygon‘s write up was faintly optimistic.

Will you be watching when it drops? It’s currently scheduled to drop on March 5, 2021.