Related Articles
Godzilla vs Kong director Adam Wingard is making a ThunderCats movie. The director confirmed to Deadline that he will helm a film based on the much-loved ’80s animated show about humanoid alien cats.
Wingard and his regular writing partner Simon Barrett are set to rework an existing ThunderCats script, with Dan Lin from production company Rideback (The Lego Movie) and Roy Lee of Vertigo (Host) producing. The pair previously produced Wingard’s adaptation of the anime Death Note.
Speaking to Deadline, Wingard stated that the ThunderCats movie will be a mix of live-action and CGI, and will remain faithful to the classic look of the animated series. He also specified that he wanted to avoid the much-criticised cat costumes of 2019’s musical flop Cats.
“I want them to look like ThunderCats,” he said. “I don’t want to do it live action, either. I don’t want it to look like Cats, I don’t want those kinds of issues–no disrespect to that director, whom I don’t mean to throw under the bus any more than everyone else has. I want to do a movie you’ve never seen before. A hybrid CGI film that has a hyper real look and somehow bridges the gap between cartoon and CGI. That’s the starting point.”
Wingard also revealed that this isn’t the first time he’s worked on a ThunderCats screenplay. The filmmaker was so obsessed with the show as a kid that he wrote his own version. “I was writing my ThunderCats screenplay through my entire 10th grade year,” he said. “And I was hand-writing it. The screenplay itself ended up being 272 pages long. I still have it. It was one of those things where I would carry around my notebooks and talk about it. I didn’t even realize the kids in my class were making fun of me as they would ask me questions about my ThunderCats screenplay.”
The original ThunderCats series was written and voiced in the US, and animated in Japan. It ran for four seasons from 1985 and 1989, with a TV movie titled ThunderCats–Ho! Released in 1986. A new series was produced by the Cartoon Network in 2011, which ran for a single season.
Wingard is also planning to make a sequel to John Woo’s ’90s action favorite Face/Off, which starred John Travolta and Nicolas Cage. In the Deadline interview, he stated that this would be a direct continuation of the story of their characters, Sean Archer and Castor Troy.
