(UTVNEWS | COLOMBO) – “Godzilla vs. Kong,” “You’re Next” and “The Guest” director Adam Wingard has been set to direct a big-budget “ThunderCats” movie for Warner Bros. Pictures.
The original late 1980s Rankin Bass animated series revolves around a group of humanoid cats who must flee their planet of Thundera after it’s destroyed. Crash-landing on another planet, Third Earth, they must thwart the evil sorcerer Mumm-Ra who is bent on killing them off.
Dan Lin and Roy Lee have long been attached as producers, the pair having previously worked with Wingard on Netflix’s “Death Note,” with an early script by David Coggeshall. Wingard will now rewrite the script with Simon Barrett.
While the animated series serves as a jumping-off point, Wingard will reportedly take the property “in a direction he has been thinking about for many years”.
It won’t be the first time, Wingard has been such a big fan he actually wrote a 272 page-long handwritten “ThunderCats” screenplay in tenth grade.
The plan is for “a hybrid CGI film that has a hyper-real look and somehow bridges the gap between cartoon and CGI” according to Wingard who dubs it a “new type of fantasy sci-fi spectacle film that people have never seen before”.
He also plans very much to retain the 1980s aesthetic of rich color and has no plans to change the character looks: “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.”
The announcement comes as “Godzilla vs. Kong” opens Wednesday in U.S. theaters and on HBO Max after making a pandemic record $123 million opening weekend gross in 38 overseas markets.