Flintstones Reboot Being Written By Super Mario Bros Movie Directors

A feature film reboot of the long-running animated series The Flintstones is in development from The Super Mario Bros. Movie directors Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic. The duo have experience reviving beloved properties, working as a writer and producer on projects like ThunderCats, ThunderCats Roar, Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders, and Elf: Buddy’s Musical Christmas. They also wrote Teen Titans Go! To the Movies and Teen Titans Go! vs. Teen Titans. The news comes as part of a broader interview with Warner Bros. Animation’s Bill Damaschke, who revealed a number of projects in a conversation with Deadline.

The film, called Meet the Flintstones, will apparently be an origin story. It presumably will not include characters who appeared in later seasons of the original show, like Pebbles, Bam-Bam, and the Great Gazoo. This is the latest in a long line of attempts to revitalize The Flintstones, including a recently-aborted effort by Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane.

During his time at Dreamworks, Damaschke helped develop a number of big hit films like Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda, and How to Train Your Dragon.

The Flintstones originally ran from 1960 until 1966, and was the first animated series ever to air on prime time TV in the United States. The series was a fairly standard family sitcom, with the twist that it takes place in prehistoric times, with the characters coexisting with dinosaurs, mastodons, and buildings and appliances made of stone. In the years since the original run, the characters have been brought back in dozens of TV series, films, TV specials, and shorts.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, The Flintstones had a surge in popularity after going into syndication on cable. This resulted in projects like The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones, A Flintstones Christmas Carol, and a pair of live-action adaptations — 1994’s The Flintstones and 2000’s The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas. Comic book writer Mark Russell’s miniseries based on The Flintstones was the most acclaimed project to come out of DC’s late 2010s partnership with Hanna-Barbera, and got a one-shot follow-up that teamed the “modern stone-age family” up with Booster Gold.

The most recent take on the property was Yabba Dabba Dinosaurs, which ran for two seasons in 2021 and 2022, but was removed from HBO Max as part of their August 2022 animation purge. Unlike many of the shows and movies removed from streaming, though, it does not appear that Yabba Dabba Dinosaurs was written down, because both seasons are still available to rent or buy on Vudu and Amazon’s Prime Video.