Fans have been waiting for Twisted Metal to be adapted from the hit crash-n-smash video game series about vehicular mayhem ever since it first came out in the long, long ago of the mid-1990s when it first debuted. When the series became a mega-seller, having shifted some 5,000,000 copies by 2000 it fell onto studio radars.
As the property has developed it’s built up the quite the stacked cast. Now the iconic clown of the series has found a voice actor in LEGO Batman himself, Will Arnett. in the Twisted Metal series that will come out for streamer, Peacock.
Besides producing, Arnett will lend his voice to the king of the psychotic clowns, Marcus Kane, aka Sweet Tooth. The character of the iconic clown who turns that frown upside down as he runs people over in his whimsical—and very, very deadly—ice cream truck has been splashed across Twisted Metal marketing for years. Arnett is the latest to join the twisted cast of Twisted Metal.
Back in 2012, Sony was looking to make an adaptation of the famous franchise, tapping Crank and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance director Brian Taylor to try to hammer out a franchise. Despite many attempts, after five years Taylor announced that Sony had tapped out and called it for the attempted driving mayhem franchise—it was DOA. Then they cued it back up with the team behind Deadpool.
Now Peacock has stepped in, with Universal looking to shore up another driving franchise after their mega-successful Fast & the Furious series and spinoffs have dominated the market for so long. Tapping Deadpool producers Rhett Reese and Patrick Wernick to spearhead what’s been called an “adrenaline-fueled comedy” since you can’t spell “vehicular manslaughter” without “laughter.” Anthony Mackie (The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) is starring and producing and Kobra Kai writer-producer Michael Jonathan Smith has been tapped to be the showrunner.
The game series—about a destruction derby of colorful characters presided over by the mysterious Calypso, a Mephistopheles-style gamemaster—has amassed a cast of stars over the past several months. Besides Mackie, they’ve added Stephanie Beatriz (Pee-wee’s Big Holiday), Neve Campbell (Scream), and Thomas Haden Church (Spider-Man: No Way Home) to join in on all the road rage mayhem. Kitao Sakurai, who made his bones behind the camera on The Eric Andre Show and the Superbowl LVI McDonald’s ad that featured Kanye West, will direct.