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With the Warner Bros./Mattel movie Barbie on the horizon, it looks like these two corporations are eager to keep making motion pictures together. Warner Bros./Mattel Films, in association with Bad Robot, announced that Dalton Leeb and Nicholas Jacobson-Larson would be writing a brand new script for a movie based on Hot Wheels. Those miniature cars have been dominating the imaginations of children and grocery store checkout aisles for decades now, making it no surprise that Hollywood would want to make a movie based on these vehicles. What is surprising, though, is how long major studios have been determined to make a Hot Wheels film happen. In an industry where movies as inexplicable as The Adventures of Pluto Nash and Welcome to Marwen exist, filmmakers have spent decades now trying and failing to crack what a motion picture version of Hot Wheels would look like.
The First Test Drive of a ‘Hot Wheels’ Movie
Put yourself in the mindset of somebody in 2003. You turn on the radio. The familiar beats of “Crazy in Love” begin to fill your ears. Your mind drifts toward thoughts on just how many seasons The WB’s new sexy take on Tarzan is going to run. Then, as you open up a newspaper or perhaps even a webpage on your dial-up internet, you see the headline: “McG will direct a Hot Wheels movie.” The director of Charlie’s Angels was now helming a big-screen adaptation of those toy cars for Angels distributor Sony/Columbia Pictures. Given how lucrative his two movie adaptations of that TV show were, it only makes sense that Columbia executives would salivate at the idea of McG handling another time-worn pop culture property.
Three years later, McG revealed to Comingsoon.net that he was no longer helming the feature, but he was still involved as a producer. Though McG himself insisted Hot Wheels was still just in development, he revealed a good deal about the movie’s proposed plot to this outlet. The premise would’ve focused on a kid with a troubled relationship with his father who ends up taking his dad’s racecar and….travels through a portal to “this world,” with McG failing to specify what kind of world this would be (a world with sentient cars?). The director clearly had 1980s cinema on his brain in describing this iteration of the Hot Wheels movie, as he referenced Back to the Future and Stand by Me as two creative touchstones for the project.
By 2009, the feature had shifted over to Warner Bros., but the production had reached a standstill at the studio. Burn Notice creator Matt Nix had penned the then-most recent draft of the script and expressed excitement over how much fun it was to write that screenplay. However, he noted that Warner Bros. had experienced a major box office bomb with another costly film focused on cars, Speed Racer, the preceding year and now the studio was anxious about the financial prospects of Hot Wheels. Despite lots of initial hype over the possibilities of what a big-budget live-action Hot Wheels movie could look like, this production had now spent several years troubled and on the back burner.
The Revival of the ‘Hot Wheels’ Movie
Speed Racer got the brakes pumped on a Hot Wheels movie, but another car-based blockbuster would help get this proposed project into the fast line. In April 2011, Fast Five exceeded all box office expectations with its massive global success. Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his family had Hollywood eager to look around for further car-based movies they could turn into similar box office juggernauts. This is where the Hot Wheels property came into play. Legendary Pictures scooped up the film rights to this toy less than two months after Fast Five premiered. In announcing this project, Variety revealed that this was not going to be your grandma’s Hot Wheels movie. To compete with the likes of Fast Five, Legendary wanted to develop a gritty and edgy Hot Wheels movie rather than something that would appeal to kids, a pointless demographic that had only supported and loved the franchise for decades.
It would take two more years before Legendary found its finalists to direct this movie, with Simon Crane and Juan Carlos Fresnadillo being the two main choices for this gig. By this point, the production had shifted its creative aspirations, with Hot Wheels now aiming to emulate Mission: Impossible more than Fast & Furious. Crane was eventually selected to helm the movie, which would’ve focused on a past-his-prime state trooper having to face a criminal (whom the trooper’s father once imprisoned) armed with an unspeakable military device. Fast cars would’ve presumably factored into this plot too. While there was initially a lot of buzz over this film, there was soon radio silence on Hot Wheels. This is due to a slew of factors, but the financial problems of Legendary (which lost $500 million in 2015, less than two years after Crane was hired for Hot Wheels) likely played a part in this new blockbuster not getting off the ground.
Justin Lin, a veteran of the Fast & Furious movies, was then conscripted in 2016 to helm Hot Wheels because if you want to make a Fast & Furious knock-off, why not go to the man responsible for the original source? However, Lin’s busy schedule ensured that Hot Wheels was always on the back burner for this filmmaker, who eventually just opted to go direct F9 instead. As Legendary continued to struggle at the box office and wound down its distribution deal with Universal Pictures, the prospects of Hot Wheels coming to life seemed slimmer and slimmer. By early 2019, a new studio was poised to take on the property.
A New Day for Mattel Movies…but Can ‘Hot Wheels’ Finally Pick Up Speed?
At the start of 2019, Mattel Films, a division of the toy company dedicated to film adaptations of big Mattel properties, suddenly revved up its development slate. While various movies based on Mattel creations had been in development for decades now, there was now a label dedicated to getting these projects realized at various distributors. This is when Margot Robbie‘s Barbie began to gain momentum, while, over the next two years, a slew of Mattel properties ranging from Wishbone to Barney would get new feature film adaptations announced. Then there was Hot Wheels, which moved from Legendary Pictures to Barbie distributor Warner Bros.
While Barbie, which also went through years of development and creative dead-ends, quickly picked up steam when it was picked up by Warner Bros., Hot Wheels was a lot more stagnant. However, nearly two years after first picking up the property, writers Neil Widener and Gavin James were hired to pen a draft of this feature, though details of their vision for this toy adaptation were unknown. In 2022, there was finally further news on the motion picture when Bad Robot Productions, as part of its long-term creative deal with Warner Bros., agreed to join the project. There was further radio silence on Hot Wheels until Dalton Leeb and Nicholas Jacobson-Larson came around to try their hand at being the latest screenwriters to try and crack what on Earth a Hot Wheels movie can be.
The struggles of the Hot Wheels movie to ever come to fruition can be laid at the feet of how difficult it is to make movie adaptations of toys work. The trailblazer of this subgenre, Transformers, got lucky in that there was a specifically-defined group of characters (even among the humans) to draw from, ditto G.I. Joe. Having Optimus Prime and Sam Witwicky be pre-established characters obviously didn’t result in a masterpiece movie, but it did make it more logical why that movie adaptation of a toy was easier to make a reality. Meanwhile, The LEGO Movie had countless archetypes (construction worker, astronaut, Abraham Lincoln) that had defined LEGO minifigures for decades, not to mention LEGO versions of famous pop culture figures, to build its story around.
However, many other toys are much more abstract than Optimus Prime and the LEGOs. They’re objects or board games that rely heavily on the imagination of children to fill in the gaps. That quality makes them great enduring toys but makes them difficult to build movies around. Battleship, for instance, is a strategy game with no discernible “people” on the board, just pegs. Making a movie adaptation of that was always a fool’s errand that would’ve required way too much imagination for the eventual director of its movie adaptation, Peter Berg.
A lot of the proposed Mattel movie adaptations have likely stalled because of struggling from this problem, including Hot Wheels. Whereas Barbie at least has a lot of different material from her lengthy history to choose from (Barbie and Ken are iconic characters, but there are also the cars, the houses, the various jobs Barbie’s had, etc.), Hot Wheels is a blank slate. There are no specific characters or tangible mythology within the original toys themselves, just a lot of brightly colored cars. Making a movie out of that could result in something fun and imaginative, but the issues with adapting these toys have been compounded by how the various Hot Wheels movies have been built from the ground up to just mimic other then-recent hit blockbusters.
Being confined both by the limitations of the source material and the need to replicate past successes, it’s no wonder making a movie out of Hot Wheels cars has proven a constant creative bust over the years. Maybe if Barbie sets the box office world on fire, Warner Bros. and Mattel Films will just force a Hot Wheels movie into existence just to keep their creative partnership flourishing. But even with news of new screenwriters getting attached to the project, two decades of creative dead-ends make it unlikely Hot Wheels will be zooming into movie theaters anytime soon.
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