Posted in: Movies, News | Tagged: bad robot, hot wheels, WB

Hot Wheels Film Races Away With New Writers At WB

The Hot Wheels film has a new set of writers, as pre-production ramps up on the Mattel toy line property. Next: they pick a director.

Hot Wheels is revving up, as the film based on the ever-popular toy has new screenwriters. Dalton Leeb and Nicholas Jacobson-Larson will write the script, and WB and Bad Robot are actively searching for a director. Other Mattel films in the pipeline in various stages of development include American Girl, Barney, Magic 8 Ball, Major Matt Mason, Matchbox, Masters of the Universe, Polly Pocket, Rock' Em Sock' Em Robots, Thomas & Friends, Uno, View-Master and Wish Bone. Of course, their biggest film right now is this summer's Barbie film starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. That Greta Gerwig film opens in July. Deadline had the news of the Hot Wheels scriptwriters being hired.

Hot Wheels Could Be Pretty Cool, If The Cast Is Right

"In the 1960s, Elliot Handler, a co-founder of Mattel, Inc., envisioned a die-cast car to surpass the popular English Matchbox brand. He wanted a line of toy cars to dominate Mattel's boys' division just as its Barbie doll had become the strongest brand in its girls' division. Handler insisted that the toy cars look authentic, so the project enlisted Harry Bradley, a top auto designer from Chevrolet, to lead the toy design team. What Handler really wanted was not the cars of Detroit but the radical versions altered by custom-car shops—like vehicles he often saw on California's highways. And Handler wanted his little cars to zoom. So, Mattel engineers produced "muscle" cars with thick, plastic mag wheels built for speed and minimal friction axles that featured "torsion-bar suspension," which gave the cars shock absorbency and wheel bounce. Mattel's designers enhanced the cars' appeal with the candy-colors of Spectraflame, a painting process that revealed the shiny metal beneath the colors. The toy company developed flexible, plastic tracks for racing Hot Wheels, complete with the famous loop that became the symbol of the brand to several generations of kids."

You could easily dismiss these as cash grabs based on toy lines, but I disagree. I think some of these are ripe for good storytelling, and Hot Wheels is right up there as one of the best set up to succeed. Something like Hot Wheels can be so many different types of films; I am actually excited to see what they cook up. It will mostly depend on the cast and director, though. More news on that as we find it out.

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