When you heard the news earlier this week of a new ThunderCats movie, there’s a chance you paid it no mind. These days so many projects are announced, directors attached, and scripts developed that so few of them ever see the light of day. That goes doubly for huge fantasy adaptations. Think about how many Voltron or He-Man movies you’ve heard about in the past 10 years — and then think about how many have actually come out?
But Adam Wingard thinks he can get ThunderCats done. The director of Godzilla vs. Kong is now attached to adapt the property and in a new interview with Uproxx, he said the script that was already written for a potential film felt like something was missing.
“I think it’s for the best that [previous versions of ThunderCats] didn’t happen,” Wingard said. “Because I think that even the script that I read that was developed, which was in a pretty good place, I’m not going to lie: I looked at it and I was like, ‘This is actually not too bad.’ I was not expecting a lot, so there’s a lot of good foundation within that. I’m going to do a lot of different stuff to it. 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.”
Wingard’s idea, according to initial reporting, will be much more heavily CGI-based, blending elements of live action to make the characters look like the characters fans know from the comics, toys, and TV shows.
“Anytime I picture the ThunderCats live-action it’s basically just putting makeup on people. It just looks ridiculous,” Wingard continued. “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.”
Basically, he wants to avoid this.
Wingard says he and co-writer Simon Barrett are currently reworking the most recent draft of ThunderCats, so it seems unlikely it would be their next project. But there’s no denying his intense passion or insight, or that the longer they work on it, and the better technology gets, the better a ThunderCats movie it’ll be.