Wingard on the ThunderCats Movie: "It's Not Dead. It Lives."

Adam Wingard has finally said something about his ThunderCats movie. It is his first on-the-record comment since March 2024, and the honest summary is that the film is alive and still waiting.

Polygon’s Michael McWhertor got the question in on August 31. Wingard was doing press for Onslaught, his A24 action thriller that opens Friday. Here is the whole answer, because its shape tells you more than any single line of it:

“My career’s kind of bouncing around, so different things have taken precedence. But [ThunderCats is] still kicking around. 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. It wasn’t too long ago, and then things got put on hold for this movie [Onslaught]. So I don’t really have any exciting updates. But it’s not dead. It lives. It’s just not the number one [thing] I’m working on right now.”

The one hard new fact

Strip out the reassurance and one new thing survives. Somebody wrote a new draft in early 2026. That is real. It is the first confirmed work on the script since Wingard and Simon Barrett (his co-writer on The Guest, Godzilla vs. Kong and now Onslaught) went back to it two years ago. After five years of “still happening” with nothing behind it, we will take a fresh draft.

The rest is a director being gracious about a project he has not opened in months. There is no studio decision here, no budget, no start date and nobody cast. We would not expect any of that yet, because there is nothing to announce.

Read it against 2024, and it moves the wrong way

This is the part worth sitting with. In March 2024 Wingard told The Playlist that ThunderCats was “one of the top priorities I have right now in terms of working on a script.” On August 31 he told Polygon it is “just not the number one thing I’m working on right now.”

Same man, same project, and the language has stepped down a rung. So if you were hoping that finishing Onslaught cleared his desk and ThunderCats was next, this does not say that. He talks about needing to “find time to really re-concentrate and re-engage with it”. That is how you describe a thing you have to come back to, not a thing you are inside of.

There is good news underneath it though. Barrett wrote Onslaught, so both halves of the ThunderCats writing team spent this year on the same film. Both come free at the same moment. Polygon also notes that Wingard recently walked away from his planned Face/Off sequel, and reads that as a good sign for our movie (their read, not ours, though we do not disagree). A director shedding commitments beats a director collecting them.

What he did not say, which is the interesting part

Wingard was not drawn on the other ThunderCats movie. Back in June, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation announced its own animated ThunderCats feature at Annecy, with no director, no cast and no date. Nothing in this interview touches it.

So we cannot tell you what that means. There are two readings and no evidence for either one. It could be a studio hedging across two formats, and then Wingard’s hybrid still has its own lane. It could be Warner Bros. quietly deciding animation is the safer bet, and then a live-action hybrid sitting in development since 2021 is exactly what gets dropped. He did not address it. Nobody pressed him. Inventing a signal that is not in the transcript would not help any of us.

Polygon raises a third factor we had underweighted. Amazon MGM’s Masters of the Universe failed at the box office this summer. An ’80s cartoon adaptation underperforming is not neutral information for the next one, whatever anyone says publicly. Our friends over at heman.org lived that one all year, and the result was not what that fandom wanted either.

Where this sits on the timeline

The art at the top of this page is worth a word, because it is the thing a hybrid film actually has to solve. It is the Rankin Bass production height chart, the sheet the animators worked from, and Leonard Starr called it the police line up. Curious4ever coloured it. Ten silhouettes that have to read at a glance, at wildly different heights, and Wingard has said from day one that he wants all of them as CG rather than actors in cat makeup. We keep the original uncoloured sheet, and 115 more, in our animation guide sheets.

Warner Bros. announced the Wingard film on 29 March 2021. That makes it five years and five months old this week, which is longer than the original series spent on the air. We keep the whole paper trail on our Wingard project page, updated today with this interview. If you want the last time a ThunderCats feature got genuinely close, the 2007 CGI film page still holds the script, the Charlie Wen concept art and that leaked test footage.

Set your expectations to “someday” and go enjoy Onslaught on Friday. The day a start date lands, we will be the ones shouting about it!

While we wait

Prices and stock above and below were read off the listings on 1 September. The Warner Archive Blu-ray of the series is not currently available anywhere we can point you, so the DVD set is the one that actually ships.

Come argue about it in the forums, where the Henry Cavill fan-trailer thread from last year has never quite died.

Sources

• Polygon, “The live-action ThunderCats movie is ‘not dead,’ director says”, Michael McWhertor, published 31 August 2026, read 1 September 2026. The original interview and the source of every Wingard quote above
• Collider, “Godzilla Director’s ’80s Action Reboot Officially Gets Update After 5 Year Delay”, Rob London, 31 August 2026, corroborating the quote
• The Playlist, 22 March 2024, for the 2024 priority quote we compare against
• Deadline, 29 March 2021, the original announcement
• Photo: Adam Wingard at San Diego Comic-Con 2017 by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0
• Lead art: “Police line up ThunderCats” coloured by Curious4ever, used with permission. Underlying composition is the Rankin Bass production height chart