Warner Bros. Slates 'Tom and Jerry' Live-Action CGI Movie for December 2020 Holiday Release

The beloved cat and mouse will take over the big screen in time for next year's holiday season.

Tom and Jerry will liven up the festive season next year as Warner Bros. on Friday moved the upcoming film to a Dec. 23, 2020, release.

The live-action hybrid pic of the beloved cat and mouse, directed by Tim Story, was initially slated for release in April 2021. Warners will instead fill that slot with a yet-to-be-titled event film.

Tom and Jerry will star Chloe Grace Moretz, Michael Pena, Ken Jeong, Rob Delaney, Jordan Bolger and Pallavi Sharda and is being developed by Warner Bros. Animation Group. The new film sees Tom the cat and Jerry the mouse getting kicked out of their home and relocating to a fancy New York hotel, where a scrappy employee named Kayla (Moretz) will lose her job if she can't evict Jerry before a high-class wedding at the hotel. Her solution? Hiring piano-playing Tom to get rid of the pesky mouse.

Tom and Jerry began life as a series of long-running shorts created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera in 1940. They centered on the exploits of house cat Tom and his never-ending battle with mouse Jerry. Seven of the shorts, released by MGM, won Oscars from 1943 to 1953. The animated pair have remained in the pop culture consciousness over the years, first getting their own full-length theatrical film with 1993's Tom and Jerry: The Movie.

One other small change to Warner Bros.' schedule finds The Witches being moved up by a week to open Oct. 9, 2020.