We Spoke Too Soon: ‘Hot Wheels’ Movie Rolling Forward With Paul Attanasio and Simon Crane

By  · Published on October 18th, 2013

Just a few days ago when Katey Rich at Cinemablend wrote about the end of Stretch Armstrong’s development representing a bigger end to the small fad of toy movies, it felt gut-level right. That may have been wishful thinking.

Obviously Transformers is still going strong, and now Variety reports that Legendary is pushing ahead with a movie based on Hot Wheels. Granted, that means the movie is essentially based on “automobiles,” which is the Brick Tamland method of film production. However, there are two reasons to be hopeful for what the tiny little cars can produce.

The first is Paul Attanasio, who wrote Donnie Brasco, The Sum of All Fears and a handful of other pulpy genre goodies. He’s taking over on script duty with a draft from Art Marcum and Matt Holloway (Iron Man) in hand. The second is Simon Crane, a veteran director who has done a ridiculous amount of second unit duty – including stints on World War Z, Salt and Quantum of Solace that act as the tip of the career iceberg.

With fingers crossed tightly that they won’t merely mimic Fast and Furious or pitch crashable toys for two hours, it looks like the age of toy movies has a few more miles to go before it sleeps. Fortunately, it has a palpably talented pair at the helm.

Movie stuff at VanityFair, Thrillist, IndieWire, Film School Rejects, and The Broken Projector Podcast@brokenprojector | Writing short stories at Adventitious.