A ‘ThunderCats’ Movie Is Coming From Director Adam Wingard
The dream of the 1980s is alive in Hollywood. It’s more alive now than it was in the 1980s. If Generation Xers are nostalgic for it, someone wants to make a movie out of it.
Right now, for example, Warner Bros. is prepping a movie based on ThunderCats, the animated series that aired from 1985 to 1989 and spawned a successful toy line and, later, comics and cartoon reboots. This latest version, per Deadline, will be “a hybrid of CGI and animation” and will be directed by Adam Wingard, whose latest film, Godzilla vs. Kong, premieres in theaters and on HBO Max this Friday.
In an interview with Deadline, Wingard revealed that ThunderCats has been a “dream project” for him for decades. It’s the movie he wanted to make when he first decided to become a filmmaker:
When I was in high school, I was obsessed with it. You’d think at that point, I was a little too old, that my years of obsession with ThunderCats would be when I was 6 years old. My real obsession with ThunderCats came in high school, 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 ... 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.
Well, if you’re a ThunderCats fan, and your prerequisite for someone to make a ThunderCats movie is they have to care about the source material, it doesn’t sound like you can do much better than that. (The article claims the movie “will use the animated series as a jumping-off point, but then Wingard will take it in a direction he has been thinking about for many years.”) Although there is a screenplay for the project, it will now be rewritten by Wingard and his frequent collaborator, Simon Barrett. He’s basically Pathro to his Lion-O.
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