The 2007 Movie

The Plot, in One Paragraph

An origin story. Lion-O is a teenager at the start, third in line to the Thunderan throne behind his father Claudus and his older brother. Cat’s Lair is destroyed. The royal house flees. Third Earth is the destination. Slithe leads the Mutants from inside a fighter ship, Mumm-Ra waits in his pyramid. Panthro’s skin is purple (a deliberate de-stereotyping move, per the press of the time). Snarf does not appear. The Berbils are referenced but offscreen. Cheetara and Monkian get a comic sequence. Lion-O is given a love interest named Kaeli. The Sword of Omens, the Eye of Thundera, the ThunderCats insignia, and the “sight beyond sight” idea all arrive in their canon forms. The film ends with the survivors landing on Third Earth and standing together as the ramp retracts on a departing ship. It plays as a hard PG-13 left open for a sequel.

What Happened

The project went through two drafts. Sopocy turned in the first, was hired for a rewrite, and turned that in too. Charlie Wen developed the Lion-O design language for the film. The first four pieces of official concept art surfaced via Movieline in July 2009. A short CGI test clip of Lion-O versus Slithe leaked to Flixist in February 2011. Five months later additional production art and storyboards by Dave Bullock surfaced on ThunderCats.WS, donated to the community by forum user LiarDice Films. The film itself was never greenlit. The animated feature was shelved, the 2011 Cartoon Network reboot took the property in a different direction, and ThunderCats stayed off the big screen.

The closest the property has come back to a feature since: in 2021 Adam Wingard signed on to develop a live-action / animated hybrid ThunderCats film for Warner Bros. Wingard has said publicly that he read the unproduced Sopocy and earlier-attempt scripts and found them “not bad,” using them as a foundation for his own approach. See The Wingard Project for the full picture on that one.

Dave Bullock Concept Art and Storyboards

Four character designs and six storyboard panels by Dave Bullock (Transformers: Prime, Teen Titans, Star Wars: The Clone Wars) surfaced on ThunderCats.WS on 6 July 2011, contributed by forum user LiarDice Films. The full set is hosted on our Features section under Cartoon: Cancelled Cartoon Concepts. Dave Bullock’s 2007 ThunderCats Movie Art.

Test Footage. Lion-O vs. Slithe (February 2011)

A single test clip from the production leaked online via Flixist on 11 February 2011, posted by a contributor inside the production who did not want the work to disappear when the film was shelved. The clip frames a teenage Lion-O against Slithe, previews the film’s Sword of Omens design, and demonstrates the rendering and animation approach the team had landed on. It is the only moving footage from the film that has ever surfaced.

Sourcing & Provenance

The screenplay PDF leaked to the internet on 1 February 2010. It was listed for sale on eBay and posted about by this site under its previous name (ThunderCatsLair.org) as a note on our old Facebook page. The press of the moment (Cinemablend, ScreenRant, ComicBookMovie, IMDb News) all linked back to the thundercats.org post. The underlying screenplay bitmap, the binder-hole punches, the title-page WGA contact block, the page numbers, and every line of Sopocy’s prose are untouched.

The four Charlie Wen Lion-O pieces were released by Movieline on 24 July 2009 and mirrored on this site the same week. The four Dave Bullock character concepts and six storyboards were published by ThunderCats.WS on 6 July 2011, contributed by forum user LiarDice Films. The CGI test footage was posted to Flixist on 11 February 2011 and survived on YouTube. All visual material is served from R2 here to keep the originals reachable should any upstream source go offline.