Justin Lin, the director behind The Fast and the Furious and Star Trek, has teamed up with Legendary Pictures for a live-action Hot Wheels movie starring Jeremy Renner.
Although their first attempt at a live-action film, Max Steel, might have been a bit of a disaster, Mattel is still hoping that they can catch up with Hasbro (the toy company behind Transformers) and deliver a successful toy-based film franchise. The studio has even employed the director of Fast and The Furious (4, 5 and 6) to make their dream a reality.
A live-action Hot Wheels movie has been in some form of development for quite some time it seems. Slashfilm caught up with Justin Lin to talk about his plans for the franchise:
“For me, Fast and Furious is not just a car movie either. I have an eight-year-old who plays with Hot Wheels all the time. To me, it’s amazing [to see] the therapeutic and healing properties of imagination. Those are themes I really want to explore through that because I had my own relationship with Hot Wheels when I was a kid and now I’m seeing it with my kid, so it is something I’m very excited about. I talk to Jeremy [Renner] all the time and technically, it’s still in development. I’m one of his biggest fans and I signed on because we’ve been looking for stuff to work together and we still look for stuff to work together. It was just an opportunity at that time. It was actually getting to be really exciting but I also realized that’s a whole other franchise universe. My connection to it is Jeremy and we’re finding great things to hopefully work together. We’re in touch. I love Jeremy.”
However, Lin did confirm that he isn’t in any rush to deliver the film and would like to focus on doing something good instead:
“On both Space Jam and Hot Wheels, I have great partners. A lot of times now with these big tentpoles, everybody’s trying to jam a movie in in a limited time. I feel like I’m too old for that. I want to make sure that we do everything right, so those two projects, with Legendary [on Hot Wheels] and Warner Bros. [on Space Jam 2] they’ve been great about saying, ‘What do you need, how much time do you need? Let’s keep getting it right.'”
Source: www.slashfilm.com
