Warner Bros. has been sitting on the film rights to cult cartoon series “ThunderCats” for over a decade and it looks like there is finally movement on their long-in-development feature film. Debuting in 1985, the sci-fi/fantasy cartoon focused on a group of cat-like humanoids that had adventures on an alien planet, Third Earth. The original run of the show had a very unique look as the animation was handled by a studio in Japan and was essentially an anime written by Americans.
LISTEN: Director Adam Wingard Talks ‘Godzilla Vs. Kong,’ His ‘Face/Off’ Sequel & More [The Fourth Wall Podcast]
The studio has decided to give “Godzilla vs. Kong” director Adam Wingard a crack at making the feature film as reported by Deadline. Wingard is attached to direct and will rewrite an existing script from David Coggeshall with his writing partner Simon Barrett. However, “ThunderCats” won’t be a live-action adaptation as they’ll be instead mixing traditional animation with CGI.
This is a long time coming as other cartoons from the same era such as “Transformers,” “G.I. Joe,” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” have already been mined as studio blockbusters.
Deadline also spoke with the filmmaker in a separate interview where he revealed how he approached Warner Bros. about making “ThunderCats” after delivering “Godzilla vs. Kong.”
“I’m in a place where ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ has gone well with Warner Bros. They love the movie, as we were wrapping it,” he said. “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.”
He continued to reveal what attracted him to the project, “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.'”
Wingard has a lot to celebrate after “Godzilla vs Kong” earned an impressive $123.1 million in its international debut over the weekend, the Chinese box office alone taking in a solid $69.2 million.
READ MORE: Adam Wingard Teases The Return Of “The Original Cast” For His ‘Face/Off’ Sequel
If this news isn’t crazy enough, Adam is also working on a sequel to the bonkers John Woo sci-fi action flick “Face/Off” that originally starred John Travolta and Nicolas Cage.
