Godzilla vs. Kong opens in theaters in mere days, and director Adam Wingard has a new project lined up: ThunderCats. Deadline reports that Wingard is working with Warner Bros. to direct a feature film based on the classic 1980s animated series. Rankin-Bass Animated Entertainment co-produced that series and Japanese studio Pacific Animation Corporation animated it. And Wingard is a long-time fan. He told Deadline in an interview that ThunderCats is his dream project.
Warner Bros.
Wingard wrote ThunderCats fanfiction in high school. He said he was quite focused on a ThunderCats screenplay for his entire tenth grade year, just writing it by hand. It ended up at 272 pages. And now, in the present day, Wingard heard his producers on Death Note (which Wingard also directed) had a possible ThunderCats script so he leapt at the opportunity. He asked to rewrite the script with Simon Barrett. And Wingard plans to lean into the ’80s aesthetic. He made it clear he doesn’t want to try live-action and he doesn’t want to veer into uncanny valley Cats territory. Specifically, Wingard stated he wants to make “a hybrid CGI film that has a hyper real look and somehow bridges the gap between cartoon and CGI.”
Though now I can’t stop thinking about what Lion-O would look like if he appeared in Cats. I wish I could banish that image from my brain.
ThunderCats, the story of an elite group of cat-like aliens from Thundera, has had a couple of reboots. The most recent, ThunderCats Roar, aired in 2020 on Cartoon Network. The franchise has had video games, too. And the one feature attempt in the early ’00s didn’t end up landing anywhere. Wingard’s take, if it comes to fruition, would be the first ThunderCats movie.
Amy Ratcliffe is the Managing Editor for Nerdist and the author of A Kid’s Guide to Fandom, available for pre-order now. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.