Godzilla Vs. Kong's Adam Wingard is making the animated ThunderCats movie of his dreams

By Sam Barsanti | March 29, 2021 | 11:33pm

Film Features Adam Wingard

Godzilla Vs. Kong's Adam Wingard is making the animated ThunderCats movie of his dreams

ThunderCats Screenshot: YouTube

Director Adam Wingard’s Godzilla Vs. Kong is apparently pretty good, which is only surprising because the previous two Godzilla movies were somehow very boring, and it looks like he’s already cashing in on the film’s success with another big franchise deal: According to Deadline, Wingard is going to direct a “hybrid” CGI/animated movie based on ThunderCats—the ‘80s fantasy-action cartoon from Rankin-Bass about humanoid cat people fighting an evil mummy-man. For those who missed out, just know that it was awesome.

And just to be clear: We said “CGI/animated,” not “live-action.” This isn’t going to be Cats with swords and a car that looks like a cat, it’s going to be some kind of “hyper real” film that “somehow bridges the gap between cartoon and CGI.” That’s how Wingard describes his concept in a very enthusiastic Deadline interview, in which he specifically calls out Cats and then immediately walks back his criticism so director Tom Hooper doesn’t feel bad (which is very nice of him). More importantly, he also reveals that he largely blew off a year of high school because he spent all of his time handwriting a 272-page ThunderCats screenplay. His dream was to someday become a filmmaker specifically so he could make the ridiculous ThunderCats movie of his dreams, but he gave up on it when he realized that his classmates were making fun of him over it.

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Jump ahead to now, and it sounds like Wingard was able to convince Warner Bros. to pick up a totally different ThunderCats script that has been floating around just so he could have the chance to rewrite it himself (along with co-writer Simon Barrett) and then finally make the movie he always wanted to make. Wingard says that “nobody on this planet knows or has thought as much about ThunderCats” as him, and so his intention is to stay true to the stuff he loved about the old cartoon. He says he’s not going to “reinvent” how the characters look, but instead will try and make a film that “takes you back to that ‘80s aesthetic.”

Meanwhile, Wingard is also the guy who’s been tapped to direct a Face/Off remake, which is the sort of project that could also be somebody’s dream gig. In that same Deadline interview, Wingard teased that his vision for the movie is that it will be a sequel and not a remake, explaining that it will specifically be a “follow-up” to the story of Sean Archer and Castor Troy (John Travolta and Nicolas Cage in the original) and “what it entails.” He might not be making it next, but it seems like it’ll at least be coming along sooner than ThunderCats.

The lesson in all of this is that you should never, ever let anyone make you feel bad about whatever nerdy thing you’re obsessed with, especially if it’s an ‘80s cartoon. For Wingard it was ThunderCats, for someone else it might be… just to pick a random example… The Transformers. Either way, it’s okay to like stuff.