The new US trailer for Tom & Jerry: Forbidden Compass confirms the film everyone had been half-expecting since Warner Bros. and China Film Co. announced it: a 9 September 2026 theatrical release through Viva Pictures, with Eric Bauza and Benjamin Diskin stepping into an English-language dub as Tom and Jerry.
The setup is a straightforward museum chase that spins into a portal story: the pair activate an ancient compass mid-scuffle and get hurled into a distant, mythic-looking era, where the trailer shows them forced to cooperate rather than fight in order to get home. It is the first American-facing look at a film that had already existed for a year in China, and it leans hard on scale, treating the compass world as a spectacle set piece rather than a backdrop for a couple of extra sight gags.
What the trailer adds is confirmation of how far this version strays from the shorts format: a large cast of new characters built around Chinese mythology, including a Heavenly Master and Phoenix Master figure (voiced in English by Matthew Yang King) and a warring-ruler plot driving the story, none of which exists in any prior Tom and Jerry release. Earlier reporting had only described the world as "inspired by Chinese mythology and folklore"; the marketing now shows what that means in practice, a full secondary ensemble the cat and mouse have to navigate rather than headline alone. It also confirms this is a straight English dub of the Chinese production rather than a reshot version for Western audiences, arriving nearly thirteen months after the film's Shanghai premiere.
The context that gives the trailer weight is production history: this is the first fully computer-animated Tom and Jerry feature in the franchise's 85-year history, made by Origin Animation for China Film Co. and Warner Bros. Animation, and directed by Zhang Gang in his feature debut. Zhang has said the project began five years ago as a Warner Bros. brief to localize Tom and Jerry for Chinese audiences, and drew the film's magical-guardian mythology from a childhood memory of a rooftop ornament on his family's Beijing home. The film premiered at the Shanghai International Film Festival in June 2025 before a China-wide release that August, where it opened modestly against a crowded animation slate.
Chinese and now early Western reviews give the trailer's tone useful context: Rotten Tomatoes sits at 25% and Metacritic at 38, with critics converging on the same complaint, that Tom and Jerry become supporting players in their own movie, sidelined by the mythology-driven newcomers the trailer is now selling as the main attraction. That's a real risk the footage doesn't dispel; the 2021 live-action hybrid Tom & Jerry film faced a version of the same problem by burying the duo in a human plot, and this film's fantasy-quest structure could easily repeat it in a different key.
