Why Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass is so bad? It opened at 0%
An 86-year-old franchise just set its own all-time Rotten Tomatoes record, and the reviews agree on the strangest reason: the cat and mouse are barely in their own movie.
Start with what this thing actually is, because almost nobody in the US saw it coming. Tom and Jerry: Forbidden Compass is a fully CG-animated feature — a first for the franchise — written and directed by Zhang Gang and produced by China Film Co. with Warner Bros. and Origin Animation.
It premiered at the Shanghai International Film Festival in June 2025, opened across China that August, and only reached US theaters on September 4, 2026, through Viva Pictures' kids label. The reviews that trickled in since have settled at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes — per ScreenRant, the worst score in the franchise's history.
The plot is the first answer
A museum chase activates a mythical compass that sucks Tom and Jerry into Gold City, an ancient realm under attack by a villain named Mega Rat, guarded by a Phoenix Master trying to earn his way back into heaven. Jerry falls in with a crime lord; Tom gets mistaken for a divine messenger.
If that paragraph reads like it's missing the part where a cat hits a mouse with a frying pan, the critics agree. The recurring complaint, summarized by Pirates & Princesses, is that the title characters are supporting players in their own film, shoved aside by lore the franchise never asked for.
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Empire's Helen O'Hara described sitting through its relentless, pace-free running battle as a fight for survival. Audience reports add that the tone runs darker than the marketing suggests, scaring the small children it was presumably made for; the IMDb user rating sits at 3.7.
What a 0% hides
Two fairness notes. First, even the harshest reviews praise the animation itself — the craft isn't the problem, the script is.
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Second, this is a 27-review-scale release, not a tentpole: a China-first co-production (where Tom and Jerry remain enormously popular) that Warner licensed out, sat on for a year, and quietly dropped into US theaters with no premiere and no press push. The 0% is earned, but it's also what happens when a movie is distributed like something nobody wanted found.
Tom and Jerry shorts won seven Oscars between 1943 and 1952. The franchise's first fully CG feature is its first 0% on Rotten Tomatoes.