How Godzilla vs. Kong inspired Adam Wingard’s ThunderCats movie

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

MINOR SPOILERS for Godzilla vs. Kong. It was announced earlier this week that Warner Bros. had tapped Godzilla vs. Kong director Adam Wingard to helm the ThunderCats movie, and it seems like a match made in Third Earth heaven as ThunderCats has been a dream project of Wingard's for decades. He revealed that he had actually spent his entire tenth grade year writing a ThunderCats screenplay that wound up being 272 pages long, and that's only scratching the surface of his obsession.

While speaking with Uproxx, Adam Wingard revealed that it was actually during post-production on Godzilla vs. Kong when he got back on the ThunderCats train; more specifically, developing the Hollow Earth sequences.

The Thundercats thing is interesting, because, I’d kind of written it off for so long. Because, like I said, as a kid, it just seemed like it was impossible. And so it was only really actually during the pandemic – and I would say during the late phases of the Godzilla vs. Kong post – when I started getting shots in from the Hollow Earth scene. I started looking at it and, honestly, this is how it started. It was literally I was looking at shots of Hollow Earth and I thought, god, this is exactly what a Thundercats movie should look like. And then I thought, wait a minute, I could make the Thundercats movie! And it’s like, this is what it should be. And up until now, I kept hearing that there was always this kind of peripheral, maybe Hollywood’s going to do a live-action Thundercats.

The ThunderCats project has been in the works for quite some time, but it had been developed as a live-action project, which is something Adam Wingard didn't want to do. "I looked at [the previous script] and I was like, 'This is actually not too bad,'" Wingard explained. "But I think the thing was is that it was clearly designed to be shot live-action. And so, there are certain things that when you read it, it doesn’t feel totally Thundercats because you can tell they were thinking of the limitations of live-action cinema. And anytime I picture the Thundercats live-action it’s basically just putting makeup on people, it just looks ridiculous. It just doesn’t seem right. Because everybody, always, they think, oh, the Thundercats, they have to look like cats. But if you really look at the Thundercats, it’s not like they’re conventionally looking like a cross between cats and humans, they’re different. They’re Thundercats. They’re bigger than that and stranger than that." Wingard will be transforming ThunderCats into a hyper-real hybrid CGI film, and it wasn't until Godzilla vs. Kong that he knew the technology to make it happen had finally arrived. "When I was making some scenes of Hollow Earth: I looked at that, and I thought the technology’s there," Wingard said. "And my experience, not just with the aesthetic of Hollow Earth, but also I felt like making King Kong such a well-rounded CGI character, that was so emotive and believable and filled with limitless possibilities for me as a director, that’s when I was like: I can do a Thundercats movie, and it would actually work."

Adam Wingard's Godzilla vs. Kong is now playing in theaters and on HBO Max, so be sure to check out a review from our own JimmyO.