'Thundercats' Movie To Be Directed By 'Godzilla Vs. Kong' Helmer Adam Wingard

Holy Snarf, a Thundercats movie is finally happening – and the project has found its director.

Adam Wingard, the director of You're Next, The Guest, and this week's gigantic MonsterVerse movie Godzilla vs. Kong, has been tapped to direct a Thundercats film for Warner Bros. based on the popular 1980s animated television series. And it sounds like Wingard is a massive fan, because in a new interview, he makes this bold claim: "Nobody on this planet knows or has thought as much about Thundercats as I have."

Deadline reports that an early draft of WB's Thundercats movie was written by David Coggeshall (Scream: The TV Series), but Wingard will come in and "start from scratch to turn all this into a hybrid of CGI and animation." Rideback's Dan Lin and Vertigo's Roy Lee are producing the movie, which is based on the animated series that ran from 1985-1989 and followed "a group of cat-like humanoid aliens who live on the dying planet Dundera. The Thundercats are an elite group that is charged with saving the species." Here's the old opening of the animated show:

WB has been wanting to make a Thundercats movie since at least 2007, and there have been several stops and starts over the years. There was even a rumor that Michael Bay's 6 Underground was a secret Thundercats film. But it's been a tough nut to crack...until now.

In a separate interview with Deadline, Wingard explains how he hand-wrote a 270-plus page screenplay for a Thundercats movie when he was in 10th grade, only to be made fun of by his classmates at the time. But he calls this a "dream project," and describes how he got involved with the real thing.

"I heard there was a Thundercats script out there and it happened to be set up with some of my producers on Death Note," he said. "I asked them, I want to rewrite this script with my friend [and frequent collaborator] Simon Barrett. This is a huge passion thing for me. Nobody on this planet knows or has thought as much about Thundercats as I have. They gave me the reins. I saw this as an opportunity to do a new type of fantasy sci-fi spectacle film that people have never seen before. It's got a rich mythology; the characters are fantastic. The colors. 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 don't want it to look like Cats, I don't want those kinds of issues, no disrespect to that director whom I don't mean to throw under the bus any more than everyone else has. I want to do a movie you've never seen before. A hybrid CGI film that has a hyper real look and somehow bridges the gap between cartoon and CGI. That's the starting point, and Simon Barrett and I are getting into the script now."

Wingard was able to take something inherently cheesy like Godzilla vs. Kong and make it fun, so maybe he can do the same thing with Thundercats. May the Snarf be with you, sir. Read our interview with him about Godzilla vs. Kong here.