Vin Diesel To Star In Thundercats?
Is ThunderCats the next big challenge for Vin Diesel to take on?
This article is more than 2 years old
If you dig up an animated series, you’ll unearth a fanbase. ThunderCats first aired in the mid-1980s. While an awesome reincarnation hasn’t really happened, that’s in large part because turning the catlike humanoid alien characters into something we’d want to see in a live-action production hasn’t been easy. Now, director Adam Wingard, responsible for Godzilla Vs. Kong, says he can do it. Is Vin Diesel on board to join him?
According to a new rumor from insider Daniel Richtman, Vin Diesel wants to lead the Thundercats movie. The gossip writer has been reporting leaks about Thundercats for a while leading up to the recent announcement. He didn’t give us more information to go on with this rumor, like how he heard it or why this matters to Vin Diesel. Was the actor a big fan of the animated series in the mid 1980s? Currently, the actor is 53 years old, so he would have been about 18 years old when the original series was on the air. Is Diesel just looking to do something different? Most of his recent films have been parts of the Fast & Furious franchise, similar action type movies, or voicing the part of Groot in Marvel productions. ThunderCats would get him away from some of the same-old projects he’s been doing for a while now.
Interestingly, about ten years ago, a fan-made trailer for ThunderCats spread across the internet. This was in the early days of fan-made trailers, so entertainment blogs were particularly shocked and amazed to see one. At the time, the effects in this fan-made trailer were something to look at. The YouTuber cast actors like Hugh Jackman, Brad Pitt, and Vin Diesel. If the actor is interested in this project, it makes you wonder if he ever caught sight of it.
One of the biggest problems to making a successful live-action ThunderCats movie is how to do the visuals justice. We live in a time where actors have now read some of the reviews of 2019’s Cats. It would seem like that would scare a lot of actors away from wanting to be in ThunderCats. No matter how great a job you do as an actor, if they make it weird in post, the actor can’t do anything to change that. Vin Diesel may not be afraid of that, though. And director Adam Wingard has come out addressing that concern right away.
The director was a big fan of the series as a teenager. He’s talked about writing a script for it while he was a bored kid in Alabama. He says that to do a live-action production, you can’t just put makeup on people and try to make them look like cats. Wingard clarified that the ThunderCats aren’t just humans that look like cats, but something different. He says, “They’re bigger than that and stranger than that.” It sounds like he has a vision in his head, which is promising.
If Richtman is right and Vin Diesel wants in on a ThunderCats movie, who will he play? In that fan-made trailer, they cast him as Panthro. This may have been, at least in part, because the character is bald. Someone like Lion-O may be more of a stretch with how we’re used to seeing Vin Diesel, but perhaps that’s the kind of challenge the actor is looking for.
