Great news… yet another classic cartoon is slated to become a terrible live-action/CG hybrid in the vein of Garfield and Alvin and the Chipmunks! Dan Lin, producer of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, Richard Kelly’s The Box, and Ricky Gervais’ The Side of the Truth, is developing Tom and Jerry as an “origin story” that tells how the cat and mouse meet, before they end up getting lost in Chicago and must work together to find their way home. Funny, that sounds like way more back story than I remember any Tom and Jerry episode ever having.

The beauty of the cartoon was in its simplicity… an angry cat chases a mouse in various settings and scenarios, always getting outsmarted, occasionally running into a bigger dog named Spike. The script for the movie is being written by a guy named Eric Gravning, who previously wrote a spec script called Mr. Burnout about “a small town English teacher who spirals from teacher of the year to a bitter, rude individual after a decade in the classroom”. Personally I think this is a moronic idea, but I’m sure it will do quite well regardless.