Godzilla vs. Kong director Adam Wingard tapped to helm ThunderCats movie!

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

So this is…interesting. Deadline reports that Godzilla vs. Kong director Adam Wingard will direct the upcoming live-action feature film adaptation of the kitsch '80s Saturday morning animated action-adventure series ThunderCats! This would be the director's second live-action remake of a cartoon series, after Netflix's Death Note film.

Here's the official synopsis for the original cartoon:

ThunderCats follows the adventures of a group of catlike humanoid aliens from the planet Thundera. When the dying planet meets its end, the group, known as the ThunderCats, is forced to flee its homeland. While leaving in their Thunderfleet, the ThunderCats are attacked by the Mutants of Plun-Darr, who attack most of their starships. The damage means they cannot reach their intended destination, so they end up on Third Earth. The ThunderCats become friendly with the natives of Third Earth, who help the cats when the Mutants find out where they are and attack again.

And here's Wingard talking about his passion for the property:

ThunderCats is a dream project for me. 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. 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. 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. It was only one day my friends asked me and I was excitedly telling him all these things about my ThunderCats screenplay. And I heard him turn around to some of the girls in the class, these were girls I had crushes on, and he’s making fun of me for writing ThunderCats! Because it was ridiculous. But that was the first moment where I had a though that maybe I would not be able to make the ThunderCats movie. I thought, am I crazy for obsessing over this, thinking it’s something you can just do? As it turns out, when you’re a kid in Alabama with no resources or connections to filmmaking, it is impossible to make a ThunderCats film. But flash forward, 20 years later and here we are.

I’m in a place where Godzilla vs. Kong has gone well with Warner Bros. They love the movie, as we were wrapping it. I heard there was a ThunderCats script out there and it happened to be set up with some of my producers on Death Note. 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. The colors. 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 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.

Obviously, this is all in the early stages, so no official start or release date as of this time (and it's unclear if this would become before or after Wingard's already proposed Face/Off 2), but either way, we'll keep you posted!

Now, as someone who doesn't have nostalgia for the original cartoon, I kinda personally think this is a waste of his talents, as the show always seemed cheap, clunky, and derivative to me. But who knows? With Wingard at the helm – and his obvious obsession with the franchise – I'll at least give him a chance. And while I wasn't the biggest fan of his Death Note adaptation, at least ThunderCats – unlike the winding and twisting plot of the Death Note anime – seems like it'll have an easier time being adapted to film, given its more simplistic action-adventure plotting. 

But what do you guys think? Fans of the original cartoon – or any of the more recent remakes? Either way, sound off below!