Adam Wingard Started Writing New THUNDERCATS Movie in High School
Godzilla vs. Kong director Adam Wingard will direct ThunderCats. And today the filmmaker reveals he started writing a Thundercats movie way back in high school.
Wingard tells Deadline: “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 6 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.“
He continues: “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. I didn’t even realize the kids in my class were making fun of me. They would ask me questions about my ThunderCats screenplay.”
He adds: “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.”
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Finally, he says: “But that was the first moment where I thought 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. But flash forward, 20 years later and here we are.”
Dan Lin and Roy Lee (who produced Wingard’s Death Note) developed the project with screenwriter David Coggeshall. But now it seems that Wingard will rewrite a script with long-time collaborator Simon Barrett (You’re Next, The Guest, Blair Witch).
The “big-scale feature” is based on Rankin Bass’ animated series that ran from 1985-89. The show followed the adventures of the team of heroes, cat-like humanoid aliens. They abandon their dying homeworld and crash land on a planet called Third Earth.
When the Thundercats awaken from their suspended animation, the group’s king and leader, Lion-O, discovers that his suspension capsule has slowed, rather than stopped, his aging, rendering him a child in the body of an adult. The Thundercats’ sudden arrival does not go unnoticed by the planet’s hostile inhabitants, putting them on a collision course with a demonic, mummified sorcerer known as Mumm-Ra.
Tobin Wolf created the series. Rankin-Bass Productions’ Telepictures Corporation originally distributed the show. Telepictures Corporation later merged with Lorimar Productions in 1986. In 1989, Warner Bros. purchased Lorimar-Telepictures and has owned the Thundercats rights to the series from that point on.
Are you excited about Adam Wingard’s Thundercats?
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