The Matchbox line of tiny toy cars is to become a big feature film, and Extraction director Sam Hargrave has landed the plum job of making it.
We learned all the way back in 2022 that Mattel was looking to get a film project underway that would feature its long-running line of Matchbox toy cars. As part of the press release, it was trumpeted that ‘one Matchbox car is sold every second’ meaning that the brand possesses that all important ‘pre-awareness’ that is seen as crucial by the folks that give these types of films the thumbs-up.
Then 2022 happened and that other film based on a Mattel toy did rather well. You may have read a thing or two about the success of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, but in the wake of that film’s huge success, Mattel announced that it had a number of projects on the horizon that would soon engulf us in a wave of toy movies.
Along with the Matchbox movie and a new version of Masters Of The Universe (a project which has recently been revived at Amazon MGM), there’s also American Girl, Major Matt Mason, Polly Pocket, Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, Uno, View-Master. There’s also the Hot Wheels movie, which JJ Abrams has been attached to for some time now. Oh, and did we mention the R-rated Barney The Dinosaur film that has Daniel Kaluuya attached to it?
Prey screenwriter David Coggeshall has collaborated with Warrior series creator Jonathan Tropper to pen the script for Matchbox, and we now know, thanks to a report at Deadline, that Extraction director Sam Hargrave has been hired to direct.
The announcement of Hargrave as director could point to an intricate blend of visual and special effects given the complicated nature of some of the action set pieces in the Extraction films.
That’s all the news we’re privy to as of right now so there’s no publicly-named production date yet. However, should Skydance’s bid for Paramount keep moving ahead, the former will want some big name projects ready to go so that the combined studio has films with name value in the pipeline to appease investors who are apparently nonplussed about the deal.
Given Mattel’s recent successes with Barbie, this could count as one of those projects. We’ll bring you more on the Matchbox movie as we hear it.
