It's hard to believe the Sword of Omens first lit up TV screens more than 40 years ago. If you're like me, you grew up planted in front of the ThunderCats every afternoon, watching Lion-O raise that blade and shout a battle cry we all still know by heart. The cartoon has been a comic book, a wall of toys, three separate animated series, and a run of movie projects that never made it out of development.
In all that time, one thing has NEVER happened: it has never opened in a movie theater.
That may be changing. A few weeks back at the Annecy animation festival, Warner Bros. Pictures Animation rolled a sizzle reel of projects it has in the pipeline, and tucked inside was a single title card that made longtime fans sit up and take notice: ThunderCats.
No footage. No director attached. No release date, or even a window. Just the name and the studio behind it!
It's the same feature Warner Bros. has chased, in one shape or another, for close to two decades. This time the studio is betting on animation instead of live-action, and that choice could make all the difference.
Just about every big 80s toy-aisle property beat ThunderCats to theaters years ago. He-Man got a live-action film back in 1987. Transformers and G.I. Joe both had theatrical animated movies during that same decade, then full live-action franchises later. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles broke through in 1990 and have never looked back. One of the most beloved of the whole crop got left behind the entire time.
The original series debuted in 1985 and ran for four seasons and 130 episodes, following Lion-O and his fellow ThunderCats as they fled the dying world of Thundera and built a new home on Third Earth. It arrived with the full 80s machine behind it: a hit toy line, a Star Comics book on the racks, lunchboxes, the works. Kids were eating it up.
The Movie That Almost Was
The first serious crack at a film came back in 2007, when Warner Bros. set up a CG-animated ThunderCats movie. Video game art director Jerry O'Flaherty was tapped to direct from a script by Paul Sopocy, and the plan was to have it in theaters by 2010, and tell the story of a young Lion-O growing into the leader of his people. It never got the green light.
What fans DID eventually see was a leak. Years later, test footage from that abandoned film surfaced online, showing a grown Lion-O trading blows with the mutant Slithe, Sword of Omens in hand. It was a gorgeous glimpse of a movie that died in development, and for a lot of us it only made the what-if sting a little sharper.
Warner Bros. kept circling back to TV. A slick 2011 reboot on Cartoon Network reimagined the origin with sharper animation and a more serialized story, and critics liked it. Unfortunately it was canceled after 26 episodes, with soft toy sales taking the blame.
Then came ThunderCats Roar in 2020, built in the loose, comedic Teen Titans Go! style. That one landed with a thud for a big chunk of the fanbase, and it wrapped after a single season.
Live-action versions got floated for years, too. The most recent high-profile take had Godzilla vs. Kong director Adam Wingard attached, calling a ThunderCats film one of his top priorities. Like the others, it never made it in front of cameras.
Through all of it, the brand has refused to die. The toys keep getting reissued for collectors, and Dynamite launched a brand-new ThunderCats comic in 2024 that had fans lining up on pre-orders, and currently there's a ThunderCats x SilverHawks, Mumm-ra: The Ever-Living, and ThunderHawks 15-part comic book crossover from Dynamite that's due to wrap up next month. Forty years on, ThunderCats are still selling!
Why Animation, And Why Now
That Annecy reel had a second big reveal in it: a new Powerpuff Girls movie. It would be the first fresh Powerpuff Girls animation since the second series ended in 2019. Read together, it looks like Warner Bros. is digging into its own vault and betting that its classic cartoons will be best AS cartoons on the big screen.
For a property like this one, that instinct feels right. So much of what people love about ThunderCats lives in the animation: the character designs, the mythology, Lion-O's coming-of-age arc, that unforgettable theme song. A cartoon movie can lean into all of it without fighting to make a humanoid cat look convincing in the real world. Not to mention the time and money involved in something that would require that much CGI.
A title card in a sizzle reel is a long way from being a greenlit project, and we've watched ThunderCats movies evaporate before. But it's the most real this dream has felt in a long time, and it's sitting at the studio's theatrical animation arm with a title card already cut into a public sizzle reel.
If the reveal has you itching for a refresher, the classic 1985 series and the 2011 reboot have both turned up on streaming over the years. The original run is an easy rewatch before whatever comes next!
Can Warner Bros. finally break a curse more than 40 years in the making and get the ThunderCats into a theater? If they pull it off, what do you want to see, a 2D throwback to the '85 look or something new?
Sound off in the comments below, Thunderians!
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