JJ Abrams’ Hot Wheels Movie Is Going To Be A Gritty Action Flick
According to The New Yorker, J.J. Abrams says his upcoming Hot Wheels movie will be “emotional and grounded and gritty.” How the Star Trek and Star Wars producer and director plans to accomplish this goal is not yet known, but that hasn’t stopped the rumor mill from speculating. Oh, you didn’t know J.J. Abrams was making a Hot Wheels movie?
Well, he’s hardly the only one spending time at Mattel these days, brewing up ideas for toy-to-cinema adaptations. With the buzz surrounding Greta Gerwig’s Barbie turning everyone’s TVs pink of late, there has been a lot of interest in adapting other toys for the big screen. Though it is trendy, it’s nothing new, as Mattel itself has long marketed toys and related moves and TV series simultaneously.
Decades before J.J. Abrams was adapting Hot Wheels, He-Man was sold as a toy concept on the basis of the tie-in series. Toys from Transformers, Thundercats, and Silverhawks frequently coincided with cartoon series and movies.
Marvel’s first Secret Wars comic, which will in part inspire the upcoming Avengers: Secret Wars, was conceived for the sake of a line of action figures.
Of course, these were later adapted back into toys and then into movies again and so on until we’ve just about lost track of all the iterations of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The apparent upcoming rash of toy-based productions includes J.J. Abrams’ Hot Wheels movie and a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots movie starring and produced by Vin Diesel. Though Hugh Jackman‘s 2011 film Reel Steel about battling anthropomorphic robots was compared to the classic toy, it was actually an adaptation of a 1956 short story. But one wonders if the end result of Diesel’s film will be far off that particular mark.
J.J. Abrams is making a movie based on the Hot Wheels toy line, and he says it will be “grounded and gritty.”
What little we know about J.J. Abrams’ Hot Wheels film is basically encapsulated in that brief description, especially since a screenplay for the toy car movie has yet to be drafted. But Abrams and his team apparently emerged from one of Mattel’s “brand immersion” experiences, increasingly sought by those seeking to adapt the company’s toys for cinematic properties.
The corporation’s headquarters in El Segundo, California, provides these experiences and much more as part of its constant quest for cultural relevance.
Hot Wheels: Ultimate Challenge is allowing people to design real-life Hot Wheels for a chance to have their design become an actual toy.
We like imagining J.J. Abrams playing with Hot Wheels to come up with a new movie, but can’t help having a little bit of skepticism about the depth of development of the idea at this stage. Still, there does appear to be hope for these other toy-based films that have emerged from Mattel courting Hollywood producers and directors.
It was only after quite a bit of coaxing from the company that Gerwig finally got a vision for writing and directing Barbie and it looks like the Oscar winner may well have a hit on her hands.
What more we will learn about J.J. Abrams’ Hot Wheels movie or Vin Diesel’s Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots movie remains to be seen, but it’s likely we will be seeing more of this type of adaptation in the future.
After all, Hot Wheels: Ultimate Challenge is allowing people to design real-life Hot Wheels for a chance to have their design become an actual toy as we witness the revitalization of the Transformers films with Rise of the Beasts. So we hope Abrams is on track to roll out a heart-racing, well. We hope the Hot Wheels movie is better than it sounds right now.
