We’re only a few days away from Godzilla vs. Kong’s debut in theaters and on HBO Max. However, Warner Bros. has just lined up the kaiju crossover’s director to launch their next big action franchise. According to Deadline, Adam Wingard will direct the studio’s upcoming Thundercats movie.
WB has been trying to bring Thundercats to the big screen for over a decade. In 2007, the studio greenlit a CGI-animated film based on a script by Paul Sopocy. Video game art director Jerry O’Flaherty was eventually hired to direct the movie, but the project ultimately stalled. The original Thundercats animated series premiered in 1985 and aired four seasons until its conclusion in 1989. Cartoon Network tried rebooting the series twice, once in 2011 and again last year with Thundercats Roar. Neither of those shows made it past a single season.
Shortly after Deadline broke the news of Wingard’s involvement, the outlet published a separate interview with the director. It definitely helps that Wingard has been a fan of the property since childhood. In fact, he even tried writing his own Thundercats script when he was a teenager.
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“My real obsession with Thundercats came in high school,” said Wingard. “The pinnacle of me deciding I wanted to be a filmmaker, and pushing in that direction…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 tenth 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 went on to reveal how he landed the Thundercats directing gig. Additionally, he teased what his version of the film will look like.
“I heard there was a Thundercats script out there and it happened to be set up with some of my producers on Death Note,” explained Wingard. “I asked them, I want to rewrite this script with my friend Simon Barrett. This is a huge passion thing for me. Nobody on this planet knows or has thought as much about Thundercats as I have. They gave me the reins. I saw this as an opportunity to do a new type of fantasy sci-fi spectacle film that people have never seen before. It’s got a rich mythology; the characters are fantastic.”
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“I want to do a Thundercats film that takes you back to that ‘80s aesthetic,” continued Wingard. “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 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, and Simon Barrett and I are getting into the script now.”
Are you excited to see what Wingard has planned for Thundercats? Also, who would you cast in the movie? Tell us what you think in the comment section below!
Recommended Purchase: ThunderCats: The Complete Series [Blu-ray]
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