Director Adam Wingard Gives Promising Update on Thundercats Movie

More than five years have passed since Warner Bros. and director Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs. Kong, The Guest) announced plans for a live-action film adaptation of the 1980s classic cartoon ThunderCats, yet little has materialized. Wingard has instead focused on blockbuster fare such as Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and the A24 action-thriller Onslaught. However, the director recently provided Polygon with a mostly positive update on his ThunderCats project.

The live-action ThunderCats movie remains alive, according to Wingard, who was working on it in earnest earlier this year.

During an interview with Polygon for Onslaught, Wingard explained that his ThunderCats movie is still sitting on his stack of in-development projects.

My career’s kind of bouncing around, so different things have taken precedence. But [ThunderCats is] still kicking around. I think it’s just a matter of finding time to really re-concentrate and re-engage with it. We did a new draft at the beginning of this year. It wasn’t too long ago, and then things got put on hold for this movie [Onslaught]. So I don’t really have any exciting updates.

But it’s not dead. It lives. It’s just not the number one [thing] I’m working on right now.

A brief history of the ThunderCats movie

Wingard and Warner Bros. first announced the ThunderCats movie in 2021. Deadline described it at the time as a big-scale feature film based on the animated television series. Wingard collaborated with writer Simon Barrett, who wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Godzilla vs. Kong, The Guest, and Onslaught, to expand the universe.

Wingard called ThunderCats a dream project and revealed that he wrote a 272-page screenplay about the cartoon while in high school.

My real obsession with ThunderCats came in high school, the pinnacle of me deciding I wanted to be a filmmaker. […] I actually spent most of my 10th grade year, I completely blew it. I didn’t pay attention in school, made terrible grades. And the reason? I was writing my ThunderCats screenplay through my entire 10th grade year. 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.

Wingard told Deadline that his vision for ThunderCats involves creating a new type of fantasy science fiction spectacle film that audiences have never seen before.

He also emphasized that he wants the film to honor the retro look of the original series. “I want to do a ThunderCats film that takes you back to that ’80s aesthetic. I don’t want to reinvent the way they look; I want them to look like ThunderCats. I don’t want to do it live action, either. I don’t want it to look like Cats. […] I want to do a movie you’ve never seen before. A hybrid CGI film that has a hyperreal look and somehow bridges the gap between cartoon and CGI.”

While public updates on Wingard’s adaptation have been scarce, the director recently left his planned sequel to John Woo’s Face/Off. The fact that Wingard continues to maintain ownership of his ThunderCats draft is a positive sign for the film.

There’s another ThunderCats movie

Warner Bros. Pictures Animation announced at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June that it is developing a separate ThunderCats movie, though the studio shared virtually no details regarding attachments or release dates. This represents welcome news for fans who have not seen a new series since 2020’s ThunderCats Roar aired on Cartoon Network.

It remains unclear whether that animated project will impact Wingard’s live-action and CGI hybrid movie. Another factor that could weigh on studio decisions is the performance of Amazon MGM Studios’ Masters of the Universe, which serves as another big-budget adaptation of a classic 1980s cartoon.

Source: Polygon