Sit tight or head for the exit? What the Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass end credits are hiding

Forbidden Compass has a during-credits epilogue and nothing after. Per Aftercredits, the early credits show scenes of life after the film's events, and once they end, the screen owes you nothing more. Stay through the first stretch for the epilogue, then go — there is no post-credits scene and no sequel stinger.

No teaser for a next chapter is probably for the best, given how this one was received. The film holds 0% on Rotten Tomatoes from 11 critics and a 24 on Metacritic — the only entry in the franchise's 86-year history to manage a zero.

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What you'd be sitting through

For anyone who wandered in on the brand name alone, context. Forbidden Compass is a Chinese co-production between China Film, Warner Bros., Origin Animation, and Turner, written and directed by Zhang Gang, and it's the first fully CG feature in the franchise's history.

• The plot: a museum fight over a magic compass throws Tom and Jerry into a world of Chinese mythology, where they're mistaken for gods from Heaven.
• The villain: Mega Rat, an evil inventor who fakes friendship with Jerry to steal the compass for world domination.
• The structural crime, per Film Obsessive: the climactic battle is between Mega Rat and Phoenix Master, a god angling to ascend to Heaven — and Tom and Jerry aren't in it.

The release path was almost as winding as the plot. The film premiered at the Shanghai International Film Festival in June 2025, opened across China that August, and took over a year to reach the US, where Viva Pictures put it in theaters on September 4, 2026.

The final battle of a Tom and Jerry movie is fought by a rat inventor and a phoenix god. Tom and Jerry sit it out.

The critics, for the road

The pull quotes read like a dare. The Guardian's Leslie Felperin called it "a barrage of bright colours and noise"; Mark Kermode compared the experience to "being shouted at by a hyperactive child"; the Irish Times concluded the new characters crowd out the two names on the poster.

Worldwide box office stands at $5.8 million against a 104-minute runtime that reviewers kept describing as longer. So: stay for the epilogue if you're already comfortable — it's the one piece of the film that puts Tom and Jerry back at the center, and it costs you about ninety seconds.

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