Although filmmaker and director Adam Wingard’s ThunderCats movie is still alive, it has been in development limbo for at least five years.
Wingard signed on in 2021 to direct and co-write a hybrid CGI-animation version of the beloved 1985 animated series about a team of cat-like humanoid aliens fighting for survival on a mystical planet. But now that he’s back in the spotlight promoting his new action thriller, Onslaught, questions about the current status of the film have naturally been reignited.
ThunderCats is apparently still actively being developed, even if it isn’t his primary focus at the moment. Wingard told Polygon that the project has been sidelined periodically as other career opportunities have taken precedence. Despite the intermittent progress, which included a fresh script draft completed earlier this year, the director maintains that the film is definitely still happening.
Interestingly, that’s almost exactly what Wingard said back in 2024, when the sci-fi adventure film Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire took up his attention.
“[Co-writer] Simon [Barrett] and I are still actively working on the script,” Wingard told io9 at the time. “We finished our last draft basically right when I was going into production on [Godzilla x Kong], and we just had to put everything on hold. [But] right now we’re actively working on it again.”
Part of the reason for all the stalling may have something to do with how ambitious the whole project is. Instead of going the conventional live-action, hyperrealism route, the filmmaker has long planned a hybrid CGI production designed to honor the look of the ’80s cartoon that stays true to its roots.
In a 2021 interview with Deadline, he said, “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 want to do a movie you’ve never seen before.”
Complicating matters is the current status of the brand at the studio, what with Warner Bros. teasing an animated ThunderCats feature at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June. So it remains unclear whether the project has anything to do with Wingard’s film or that its an entirely separate undertaking.
Sources: Deadline, Animation Magazine, Polygon, Warner Bros., Gizmodo