Director Confirms Live-Action ThunderCats Movie is Still in the Works

It’s been over five years since the announcement of a live-action adaptation of the beloved ’80s cartoon ThunderCats, helmed by Adam Wingard, known for his work on Godzilla vs. Kong and The Guest. Despite the long wait and minimal updates, Wingard recently shared a mostly optimistic status on the project.

According to Wingard, the ThunderCats movie is very much alive. Earlier this year, he was actively working on it, and it remains on his list of projects in development.

In a recent interview, Wingard mentioned, “My career’s kind of bouncing around, so different things have taken precedence. 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. 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.”

The ThunderCats movie was first announced in 2021, described as a “big-scale feature” based on the animated series. Wingard collaborated with writer Simon Barrett, who has worked on several of Wingard’s projects, to expand the ThunderCats universe.

Wingard has expressed that ThunderCats is a “dream project” for him, revealing that he wrote a 272-page screenplay about it during high school. “My real obsession with ThunderCats came in high school,” he recalled. “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. I still have it.”

His vision for the film is to create a “new type of fantasy sci-fi spectacle film that people have never seen before,” while staying true to the retro aesthetic of the original series. “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 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 the ThunderCats movie have been sparse, Wingard’s commitment to the project is encouraging. Recently, he stepped away from a planned sequel to John Woo’s Face/Off, allowing him to focus on ThunderCats.

In June, at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, it was announced that a separate ThunderCats movie is in development, though details about the project remain scarce. This is promising news for fans, especially since the last series, ThunderCats Roar, aired in 2020.

The impact of this animated project on Wingard’s live-action/CGI hybrid film is still uncertain, but the failure of another high-profile adaptation, Amazon MGM Studios’ Masters of the Universe, may have raised concerns for Warner Bros. about the viability of such projects.