Five years ago, Warner Bros. and filmmaker Adam Wingard (Onslaught, Godzilla vs. Kong) announced that the iconic ’80s cartoon ThunderCats — a four-season hero’s journey that follows a gang of catlike humanoids — would be getting the live-action adaptation treatment. Since the announcement, though, neither fans nor even nosy journalists with a passion for the franchise have been able to get an update on what that reimagining might look like. That is, until now. In a recent Onslaught press interview with Polygon, Wingard revealed the latest on the long-awaited ThunderCats reimagining, and what fans can expect.
Good news first: the project is still on, and Wingard confirms that a new script was even finished earlier this year. The otherwise not-so-good news is we still have to wait a little longer before meeting the ThunderCats crew again. “[ThunderCats is] still kicking around,” Wingard said to Polygon. “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… but it’s not dead. It lives. It’s just not the number one [thing] I’m working on.”
Wingard has definitely been busy since the ThunderCats project news was announced, with one of those “things” being Wingard’s new “unabashedly violent” movie Onslaught — which is set to hit theaters Sept. 4 and is already receiving high critical praise ahead of its release next week. The filmmaker is also working closely with his Onslaught co-writer, Simon Barrett, to bring the ThunderCats world back to life.
Even though audiences will still have to wait patiently in their seats before we get a trailer drop or casting update, rest assured ThunderCats is still in good hands — with Wingard previously calling the adaptation a “dream project” in a 2021 interview with Deadline tied to the announcement— the last time we were able to get a true vision for what the project looked like. Wingard, hoping to turn the project into a “sci-fi spectacle that no one has ever seen before,” told Deadline that he really wants the film to bridge the cartoon and CGI style. Honoring the original cartoon’s aesthetic while giving something unexpected for audiences to indulge in.
Five years later, Wingard still speaks very positively about the project. And even with little news to give, it still feels promising. Hopefully, that lengthy wait doesn’t end up disappointing audiences as much as some other long-time waits (cough Stranger Things cough). But if we’ve learned anything from worlds that do take their time (hello Arcane), sometimes giving a project the proper space to pour genuine love and care into it can make the final product all the more rewarding. The downside? The longer audiences wait, the higher their expectations become — and ThunderCats now has over five years of anticipation to live up to.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
