GODZILLA VS. KONG Director Adam Wingard Opens Up About the THUNDERCATS Film He's Making
Adam Wingard, the director behind Godzilla Vs. Kong, has also been developing a feature film adaptation of the hit ‘80s series ThunderCats for Warner Bros. It turns out that he’s been dreaming of making a ThunderCats film since he was in high school and the studio is actually giving him the opportunity to do it!
During a recent interview with Deadline, the filmmaker opened up about the project and the long road he’s been on trying to make it happen. He explains:
“Thundercats is a dream project for me. When I was in high school, I was obsessed with it. You’d think at that point, I was a little too old, that my years of obsession with Thundercats would be when I was six years old. My real obsession with Thundercats came in high school, the pinnacle of me deciding I wanted to be a filmmaker, and pushing in that direction…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 tenth grade year. And I was hand writing it.”
I can totally relate to that. I never wrote any scripts for ThunderCats, though. Instead, I was writing scripts and storyboarding my own G.I. Joe movies and other stories. Yeah, doing that kind of stuff in high school was definitely not considered cool. He went on to talk about how he carried his screenplay around with him and talk about it with anyone who would listen:
“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. I didn’t even realize the kids in my class were making fun of me as they would ask me questions about my Thundercats screenplay. It was only one day my friends asked me and I was excitedly telling him all these things about my Thundercats screenplay. And I heard him turn around to some of the girls in the class, these were girls I had crushes on, and he’s making fun of me for writing Thundercats! Because it was ridiculous. But that was the first moment where I had a though that maybe I would not be able to make the Thundercats movie. I thought, am I crazy for obsessing over this, thinking it’s something you can just do? As it turns out, when you’re a kid in Alabama with no resources or connections to filmmaking, it is impossible to make a Thundercats film.”
Sounds like he had some high school struggles. He then talked about his current ThunderCats project and teased how that all came together saying:
“But flash forward, 20 years later and here we are. I’m in a place where Godzilla Vs. Kong has gone well with Warner Bros. They love the movie, as we were wrapping it. 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. 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. I don’t want to do it live action, either. I don’t want it to look like Cats, I don’t want those kinds of issues, no disrespect to that director whom I don’t mean to throw under the bus any more than everyone else has. I want to do a movie you’ve never seen before. A hybrid CGI film that has a hyper real look and somehow bridges the gap between cartoon and CGI. That’s the starting point, and Simon Barrett and I are getting into the script now.”
Well, I hope that he is actually able to pull it off! I like what I’m hearing about what he’s looking to do with the project and I’m totally rooting for him! I’d love to see his version of ThunderCats on the big screen! It sounds like he really might be the right man for the job.