Thundercats Movie Director Shares Promising Update on ’80s Cartoon Classic Revival

It’s been more than five years since Warner Bros. and Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs. Kong, The Guest) announced plans to make a live-action film adaptation of the ’80s classic cartoon ThunderCats but there’s been little to show for it. Wingard’s passion project has taken a back seat to blockbuster fare such as Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and the upcoming A24 action-thriller Onslaught, but the director gave Polygon a (mostly) positive update on his ThunderCats project this week.

The live-action ThunderCats movie is not dead, Wingard tells Polygon, and he was working on the project in earnest earlier this year.

In an interview with Polygon for Onslaught, Wingard says his ThunderCats movie is still on his stack of in-development projects.

“My career’s kind of bouncing around, so different things have taken precedence,” Wingard says. “But [ThunderCats is] still kicking around. I think it’s just a matter of finding time to really re-concentrate and re-engage with it. We did a new draft at the beginning of this year. It wasn’t too long ago, and then things got put on hold for this movie [Onslaught]. So I don’t really have any exciting updates.

“But it’s not dead. It lives. It’s just not the number one [thing] I’m working on right now.”

A brief history of the ThunderCats movie

Image: Lynnvander Studios/Dynamite

Wingard and Warner Bros. announced the ThunderCats movie in 2021. At the time, it was described by Deadline as a “big-scale feature” film based on the ThunderCats animated TV series. Wingard worked with writer Simon Barrett, who wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Godzilla vs. Kong, The Guest, and Onslaught, to expand the ThunderCats universe.

At the time, Wingard described ThunderCats as “a dream project” and that he wrote a 272-page screenplay about the cartoon in high school.

“My real obsession with ThunderCats came in high school,” Wingard told Deadline in 2021, “the pinnacle of me deciding I wanted to be a filmmaker. […] 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.”

Wingard told Deadline that his approach to ThunderCats is to do a “new type of fantasy sci-fi spectacle film that people have never seen before.”

He added that he wants his film to be authentic to ThunderCats‘ retro look. “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 want to do a movie you’ve never seen before. A hybrid CGI film that has a hyperreal look and somehow bridges the gap between cartoon and CGI.”

While updates on Wingard’s ThunderCats movie have been few and far between, the director recently left his planned sequel to John Woo’s Face/Off. The fact that Wingard is continuing with ThunderCats is a positive sign for the movie.

There’s another ThunderCats movie

At the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation announced it’s developing a separate ThunderCats movie, but offered virtually no details on who’s attached to it or when it will be released. That’s good news for ThunderCats fans who haven’t had a new series since 2020’s ThunderCats Roar aired on Cartoon Network.

Whether that animated project will have any impact on Wingard’s live-action/CGI hybrid movie remains to be seen, but another project might have spooked Warner Bros. more: the failure of Amazon MGM Studios’ Masters of the Universe, another big-budget adaptation of an iconic ’80s cartoon classic.