J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot to produce live-action Hot Wheels movie
Lay down some orange track, the Hot Wheels movie is apparently happening
Aux News J.J. Abrams
Hot Wheels seems like an easy thing to turn into a movie. There’s no mythology to worry about, no characters to try and “get right,” and no pressure to live up to anyone’s expectations about what a Hot Wheels story “should” be. You just do a thing with cars, call it Hot Wheels, and wait for the money to roll in. Oh sure, you could have, like, an orange track somewhere as a little treat, and maybe a car that looks like something else but is still mostly a car, but… eh.
And yet Hollywood—the people who turned Battleship into an alien invasion movie—have struggled to make a Hot Wheels movie happen. Last we heard, way back in the innocent days of early 2019, was that Warner Bros. had reclaimed the movie rights to the toy car brand after trying (and failing) to get a Hot Wheels movie on track years earlier, and now it seems like the company is actually doing something with those rights (some 50 years or so after Johnny Hotwheel first glued pennies to a potato, inventing the first Hot Wheels car).
Deadline says that J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot studio will produce “a live-action Hot Wheels film” with Mattel Films and Warner Bros., with the story saying it’ll be a “high-throttle actioner” featuring “some of the world’s hottest and sleekest cars, monster trucks, and motorcycles.” Like we said: Just do a thing with cars and call it Hot Wheels. What else do you need?
It doesn’t sound like Abrams himself is involved too closely, meaning there’s no need to make a joke about someone asking a car for its full first and last name, to which the car responds “Hot Wheels Skywalker” as if that means something, but the fact that Bad Robot is working on this means there’s a non-zero chance that this ends up being a secret Cloverfield movie. Maybe it’s just a totally normal high-throttle actioner, but then the movie ends with a car zooming at the screen and you see that its license plate says “CLVRFLD”? That’d be cool.
14 Comments
But we already have a Hot Wheels movie franchise with ten installments under its belt. It’s called Fast & Furious.
I see no Splittin’ Image or Deora or Beach Bomb in those movies. Therefore, not canon. 😀
Touche. I’d love to see Dom’s crew pull a heist while driving Twin Mill and Bone Shaker and the Drag Bus.
A fellow parent of young kids I see. I think we have 3 of 4 bone shakers and at least a couple of twin mills at home. Also, hot wheels already produces some decent content. My kids love the hot wheels city stuff and it is entertaining enough that my wife and I can watch it and not immediately regret turning it on.
I was gonna say the same thing but with only 3 movies and it’s called ‘Cars’.I think yours is better though, have a star!
If it’s a hit, the Johnny Lightning Movie will come out soon after.And we’ll have endless Star Wars/Star Trek arguments about which franchise is better.
Holy shit that commercial makes me want to run through a wall. I’ll take it!
Oh sure, it starts off as a fun vroom-vroom car movie, but then Sony gets Micheal Bay to produce a Matchbox movie, and Syfy slaps together Burning Rubber: Hell on Wheels, and Disney cranks out two more Cars movies and a Disney+ series, and WB casts Zendaya as the second lead in the third Hot Wheels movie causing fanboys everywhere to rail about them “going woke”, and Syfy releases Burning Rubber 2: Electric Boogaloo, and Disney subcontracts someone to make Planes 3 and Boats, and fanboys get #ReleaseTheBayCut trending after the Matchbox sequel tanks at the box office, and Syfy unleashes SharkBirdBurningRubberemicnado: Yep, We Went There, and… wait, where was I taking this?
For some reason, I’m still able to remember owning a Science Friction as a Kindergarten-aged kid; I see one on E-Bay now going for $6. neat.Hot Wheels, as a concept, is simply based on cars. (Stop @@-ing me. yes, trucks, vans, motorcycles, etc., too..) There are no “core characters” to speak of at all. The challenge for the filmmakers is coming up with compelling characters that people care about. Either that, or settle for a bunch of spectacle-based stunt sequences, which is super risky. Conceptually, the latter paid off for the Venom films, but folks who remember anticipating what Speed Racer might be under the Wachowskis’ wing, post-Matrix, well… We know how that turned out.
Frickin’ sweet? Speed Racer is great!
If it ends up being anything like the Hot Wheels track sets I had in the 90s, it will constantly fall apart.
There ARE characters to get right and a whole world called Hot Wheels City on YouTube. Chase and Elliot are the main characters and Draven is the villain, and there are tons of kids who would be disappointed if they weren’t involved somehow. After reading this and the article about the “card game” Exploding Kittens being turned into a movie, I’m convinced you guys don’t do any research at all before you write these articles.
Not like they don’t have material to work with. There have been multiple DTV movies and several cartoon series based on Hot Wheels, including one that just ended a few years ago.The DTV movies even got Smash Mouth to do the theme song, way back when Shrek was still new.
Calling it now: It’s secretly a movie about the Springfield Tire Fire.