How Exploding Kittens made the jump from card game to Netflix show

The mind of Matt Inman will be studied sometime for its ability to produce cute animated kittens and wacky humor. His Exploding Kittens entertainment franchise started as a card game, made with former video game creator Elan Lee and his team.

This is a journey I covered from its very beginning. And it’s story that just makes you smile or bust out laughing.

Inman, the creator of The Oatmeal comic series, had an idea for a nutty card game involving exploding kittens while on a cruise ship with Lee and another friend, Shane Small. They decided to make the game and it blew up on Kickstarter when they sought to raise money for it. Instead of hitting their goal of $10,000, they raised $8.7 million from more than 200,000 backers on the crowdfunding platform in 2015.

It was a simple “strategic kitty-powered card game” based on Russian roulette. And now Exploding Kittens is debuting as an animated streaming series on Netflix. I’ve had a look at the show, and it’s pretty wacky.

In the story, Earth sucks, so God (voiced by actor Tom Ellis) gets fired and sent to Earth to reconnect with humanity. The catch? He’s trapped in the body of a chubby house cat. As part of his rehabilitation, he moves in with a dysfunctional family and tries to solve their problems, but ends up spending a lot of time chasing laser pointers.

And to top it off, Godcat’s next-door neighbor, who is also a cat, turns out to be none other than his nemesis, the Antichrist. The result is the ultimate fight between good versus evil…except, Godcat is distracted by a pigeon he saw in the yard and Devilcat (Sasheer Zamata) is busy napping on someone’s laptop.

I spoke with Inman and Lee about how they turned the card game series into a TV show, with showrunners Shane Kosakowski and Inman. The series is also executive produced by Mike Judge, Greg Daniels and Dustin Davis of Bandera Entertainment; Peter Chernin and Jenno Topping for the Chernin Entertainment Group; and executive producers and creators of the Exploding Kittens franchise, Lee and The Oatmeal’s Inman. There are nine 30-minute episodes in the series.

And we’re about to find out if Exploding Kittens can splatter their way from the tabletop to your TV.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: How early did the discussion around the show start? What pushed it toward being real?

Elan Lee: My memory of it–this is all now at least four years old. When we were ramping up the company, we had this very fortunate problem. Investors kept coming to us. But we’d just had the most successful Kickstarter of all time, so the last thing we needed was more money. We got to turn people away, which was a very fortunate position.

Peter Chernin and the Chernin Investment Group showed up. Peter’s argument was different. He said, “You have grown this thing as far as you can. The next step, you have to turn this into a franchise. You have to start thinking about movies and TV shows and theme parks. Other, bigger stuff. I’m the best in the world at doing that. Therefore, you should let me invest.” That was the strongest argument we’d heard. We took an investment from him.

The first question he had was, “Let’s start thinking about a TV show. Who would be your dream team? Who are the best people in the world to make an Exploding Kittens TV show?” We instantly agreed that it was Mike Judge and Greg Daniels. The Office, Office Space, Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill, all the funniest shows ever. Peter’s response was, “That’s a huge ask. That’s basically impossible.” Well, you asked for the dream team, so there you go.

A week later he invited us to his house. We showed up, and sitting on the couch is Greg Daniels and Mike Judge. They said, “Peter tells us you have the hottest new thing in the world, and you want to make a TV show. We’d love to hear about it so we can work on it with you.” That’s how the thing was born. Just the magic of Peter Chernin and then the magic of handing it off to them and Matt to write and produce the thing.

Matt Inman: The other thing that helped, I think that when most people pitch a TV show, they walk in the room and they talk a lot. They use their hands and wave around and say, “There are cats. It’ll be great.” I’ve been doing comics and storyboarding forever, so I actually storyboarded it. You can read my pitch for the show as a comic. I don’t know if you’ve read my comics much. Some of the longer ones have a bit more of a storytelling element to them, because they’re long. You read them as if you’re reading a novel. That’s what I did. That helped.

Lee: You’re being a bit modest about it. Matt is almost chronically modest, so I’m going to brag about him for a second. When you hear a pitch normally in Hollywood, like he said, it’s just a verbal pitch. Matt wrote the whole show, and it’s not just words. He illustrated the show. “Here it is. Here’s how it works. Here’s the characters and how they interact. Here’s what’s good about them. Here’s where the conflict is.” You’re presented with this document that does not stretch your imagination and ask you to imagine the thing. You’re holding it in your hand. Just say go. That’s a very unique thing to see in Hollywood.

Inman: The other thing that is worth mentioning about the way I approached the show–if you were making a show for something like Connect Four–I mean, no one would ever do that. But if they did, if you made it about Connect Four, dear Lord, who would want that? Clue is the big exception. That movie’s great. But with Exploding Kittens, I didn’t really try to make a show about kittens that explode and you defuse them. I don’t want to watch that. I don’t want to write that. That’s where I started to bend it to be–what is the show I would watch regardless of the card game? That’s where this idea came from about God and the Antichrist trapped in cat bodies.

It was partially inspired by–when I was in my early twenties, I had a girlfriend. Her parents had a cat that simultaneously behaved like God and the Antichrist. Her parents were deeply religious, to the point where it was weird. They actually had a priest come over and perform an exorcism on their cat. I would give everything I had to be in that room and see that exorcism. I can’t, and I won’t. But I had this page in a book of funny ideas about the cat exorcism. That led to the Antichrist cat and God and pretty soon we had this show, where regardless of your knowledge of the card game and how to play it, someone would want to watch this.

I guess the logline was something like–God is bad at his job, and he gets fired. He’s sent to Earth in the body of a mildly obese cat. Simultaneously, the Antichrist is very bad at her job. She’s very kind, very sweet. She’s walking around handing out Gatorade and apologizing for it. So she gets fired. Part of her rehab, part of his rehab, he has to learn to be good and she has to learn to be evil. They live next to each other. That’s the core of the show.

GamesBeat: How did the exploding part get into that?

Inman: A lot of things blow up? That’s an answer to the question. There is an event later in the season–I don’t want to give it away, but it involves lots of explosions. It’ll make sense when you see it. The other thing about the card game, something I tried to preserve–the card game has comedy in it. All the cards have jokes. For the most part they’re single-panel jokes, the kind of thing you’d see in the Far Side or something like that. I didn’t do a lot of those one to one. There are pieces of those in the show. But I tried to preserve that kind of humor, because that’s what I write. I feel like if you like the jokes in the card game, you’ll like the jokes in the show.

GamesBeat: When there was a suggestion of a TV show, did you have a deer in the headlights moment? Or did you already have ideas in mind, material that you were waiting to get out?

Inman: I think I said that an Exploding Kittens TV show sounds like a trash barge of an idea. Then I thought about it for a bit and realized, yeah, I could make a show out of that. The Oatmeal has comics. It has story. It has characters, kind of. If there was anything that came out of me for a show, it would have been an Oatmeal show. Not a show about a card game. However, like I said when I started, I remembered cat exorcisms. I started to put it all together and I realized this could be a good show.

The other thing I didn’t have with the Oatmeal was Peter Chernin and Mike Judge and Greg Daniels. I went from trash barge to–I don’t know?

Lee: I remember we got the show. We had the opportunity for the show. Matt and I were on the phone and he said, “I just don’t think this is possible. You can’t make a show about kittens exploding. That’s a non-starter. Nobody will watch that. There’s no way to write it. It’s terrible.” We ended the call on that note. I remember Matt went to sleep, went on a walk with his dogs, and he called me from the walk saying, “Okay, I think I have an idea. What if, instead of thinking about this as Exploding Kittens, we think about this as overpowered kittens in conflict, with all the stakes in the world?” Then he started pitching God in a cat’s body, the devil’s in a cat’s body, they live next door to each other and they’re in constant conflict. Explosions are the result of these two characters.

I thought this was the most brilliant thing I’d ever heard. Let’s get started immediately. That’s my memory of it. Going to sleep thinking this would never happen, and then waking up to get a call from Matt saying, “I got it. Let’s go.”

GamesBeat: Once you get a green light on this, it seems like you can do anything. Beyond the title for the show, it’s a blank slate.

Lee: That’s right. The title for the show being Exploding Kittens–because that name is so recognizable now, with a decade of sales behind it, we’re not starting from scratch. The whole point is, “I know that game. I love that game. I play it all the time. I want to see what they do with the show.” That’s the result of all this hard work. But you’re right. In that container you can put anything you want, as long as it involves kittens somewhere and has conflict to drive the story forward. Like I said, the thing that Matt crafted was a masterclass in how you fill that container perfectly.

Inman: Worth mentioning, I had a broken wrist when I drew the pitch. I was trying to draw on my tablet with a broken wrist. I took my stylus and stuck it through the hole in the brace. You can adjust digital brushes so that even if you’re a child scribbling, they’ll have a beautiful shape to them. In my original pitch all the cats look…unwell. Because I was unwell.

In my comics there are some themes like science, history, whatever. Sometimes I’ll write about things like the mantis shrimp. Then that made it into the EK card game. The “see the future” card was the mantis shrimp. When I wrote the pilot, I wanted to weave in a lot of these ideas and themes, and so the mantis shrimp becomes the villain in the pilot. Simultaneously we have a whole different card game called Mantis. We have these characters and ideas that move in and out of different types of IP – games, TV, comics. My comic about the mantis shrimp is a little book that’s included in the back of the game Mantis.

Some of this is by design. I was trying to make Taco Cat a bunch of things, because it’s the closest thing we have to a new character, previous to Godcat’s arrival. Other times it’s because it’s stuff I just want to write about. I like the mantis shrimp. I think it’s interesting and funny, so it ends up in a lot of my work.

GamesBeat: Did this start during the pandemic? Was there some kind of influence there?

Inman: Yeah, I pitched it in 2019. We got the deal closed at the end of that year, and then started working on it in 2020. Most of the show was done during the pandemic. I’ve been to a few recording sessions, but most of the voice recording with the actors was all over Zoom. Hollywood wasn’t quite as exciting as I thought, because 98% of it was in my bedroom or my office. Wow, I’m in Hollywood, AKA my room.

It got easier. Also, this show–it’s my first TV series. I had a movie deal at Illumination prior to this. This sort of thing happened at Illumination a bit, and it happened on the show, where I feel like people near or around the show that work on it–you get kind of Gollum-like. You want to possess it. It gets put through the wringer. Once we had casting done, once we had the scripts signed off, the show was great. But prior to that it was a lot of–what is this show? You don’t know what it is. What should this sound like? The casting ideas were everywhere, from Peter Dinklage to Robert Downey Jr. to–we didn’t know who this character was. We didn’t know who was going to play him. There was a lot of uncertainty.

I’m excited that if we get a season two, it will be 10 times easier, because the casting is done. The PR is done. You know what the characters look like. You know what their deal is.

GamesBeat: How do you think about the next seasons? Once you’re over that hump of being renewed–what increases your chances of making this an ongoing effort?

Inman: Completion rate, honestly. Watching the show all the way through. That’s super helpful. Obviously the usual stuff. Sharing it with your friends. But completion rate really helps. That’ll come to me more than what people do, though. Did I make a good show? Did I make a show that people want to see to the end? My goal is Fallout. I never played the game, but I watched that show and I enjoyed every frame of it. It was great. Skeleton cowboy man running around shooting stuff, I could watch that all day. Exploding Kittens, that’s the goal.

Lee: Is it worth bringing up the hidden episode?

Inman: I think Netflix is actually about to chop that thing up and release it as blooper reels. There’s an episode I wrote and directed where–I think I didn’t technically direct it. We had a director. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. The showrunner is kind of like a mega-director. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I just like talking.

But I did an episode that tells the backstory of God before he was a cat. Zooms back on how he was a god, how he became a jerk, and why he became so misanthropic. That episode was kind of divisive. We decided not to have that in season one. But I think next week they’re going to release bits and pieces of it. I don’t know if we’ll release the whole thing. Honestly that’s a question for Netflix.

Lee: I’m just a big fan of releasing that whole thing. It’s really good.

GamesBeat: It gives you more context?

Inman: The other part about it–it’s self-contained, just telling the backstory. You can lift it out of the season and it’s its own little movie, kind of. That was episode 108.

GamesBeat: The animation style, was it immediately obvious that you’d continue the way you make cats when you draw them? Did you have much discussion about that, or was the path obvious from the beginning?

Inman: Yeah, that was easy. There was discussion around the main title, the intro. I said, “Let’s do 3D. Let’s do cel-shaded. Let’s do 8-bit.” I had a bunch of pitches and we landed on keeping the main title the same as the rest of the show. But no, that was easy. The harder part–when I draw lines, literal lines around the characters, the width changes depending on how much pressure I put on the paper or the tablet. When you draw a character with that width changing and you rotate the character around, that width would wiggle and look crazy. It’s a challenge digitally to create those crazy lines without having it cause a lot of digital distortion. If you watch Mitchells vs. the Machines, they have some really cool linework. That was kind of a challenge, but our art people are amazing, so it wasn’t too bad.

Lee: You also wrote a really good style guide for them. Here are the proportions for the characters. The shape of their legs versus their hips, that arch shape. When we were auditioning studios, no one was really getting it right. Matt had to say, “Okay, let me train a bunch of people to draw like me. Here’s the bible. Go study it.”

GamesBeat: How big a team does that end up being?

Inman: When we were in full production I think the team was a little less than 100 people. Just for Netflix, not the whole company. The other thing, I’m not just saying this because it sounds like huffing or whatever, but there are really talented people at Netflix. It was so exciting and refreshing to work with artists who work in television, because they’re machines. They can draw like I can draw, and they can draw better than I can draw.

I started to get a sense of what it’s like to direct people who are better than you. Not just at art, but sound, obviously the actors–Tom Ellis, who played Godcat, was amazing. First of all, he would read the script before he came to the recording session, which is always a delight, because a lot of people don’t. With V/O in a booth you don’t need to memorize anything. You just read it there. But he’d actually read it. He’d do one take in that sort of leathery, cigar, baritone voice of his, and they were all usable takes. We could do Tom’s scenes very fast. He’s a very talented guy.

GamesBeat: Do you feel like you learned a lot in this process?

Inman: I did. It was a lot of new disciplines for me. Starting from just basic outlining a script, to writing a script, to animatics, animation, sound design, foley, music score–it’s been great. It’s been five years of learning.

Lee: The other important lesson for me has just been–Matt and I are used to being the boss. It’s our show. It’s our game. It’s our art. It’s our product. He and I kick things back and forth quite a bit, but then we tell the team what to do. That’s had tremendously positive results.

The TV show has a lot of chefs in the kitchen. Learning to work with them, learning that process, learning about notes and how to deal with notes you agree with or notes you don’t agree with–I found it really fascinating. Learning to grow that muscle, watching Matt learn to grow that muscle, and by the end getting really good at getting what you want out of that kitchen with a lot of people in it.

GamesBeat: What was your role in this, relative to Matt’s?

Lee: First and foremost, my role was to run the games side of the company while Matt ran the entertainment and TV side of things. We both agreed that we have to have people in charge of each. That was the biggest thing. But on the TV show side, for me it was really more on the management side than I’ve ever been before. Dealing with a lot of lawyers, reading a lot of contracts, figuring out how to make sure we could maintain the rights we need to maintain. Most of the stuff I did was non-creative on the show, which was very weird for me. I learned a lot. I’m glad I did it. I could do it again. But I’m very excited to go back into the creative stuff now.

GamesBeat: What are you doing with the rest of what you have going on? Especially with physical and digital games?

Inman: Netflix has an Exploding Kittens app that’s free. They developed it. It has some updates with the show that are coming out. I’m also working on that.

Lee: We have a version of Exploding Kittens we released called Good vs. Evil. It’s Exploding Kittens, the core Exploding Kittens engine, but we replaced all the art with characters from the show. New art for every single card. We introduced a new game mechanic so that Godcat and Devilcat are in the game, and they have their own little mini-game that’s triggered by a certain event in Exploding Kittens. It allows you to sabotage, betray, and explode your opponents in a spectacular way.

We have a bunch of interesting digital stuff. We have Exploding Kittens 2 coming out on Android, iPhone–I think Switch is coming, but it’s a little delayed. We have a VR game coming out as well. The goal for us is, now that we understand how to build stuff, how to build stuff quickly, and now that our characters have voices and they live in a world, which is exactly what the TV show created for us–instead of being just static, now suddenly they’re dynamic. Now the lid is off the can. We’re just trying to expand this into all the places that feel natural. We have an exciting world to put out there and let people live in.

GamesBeat: Do you think you’ll run further with Exploding Kittens, or do you want to try to turn more projects into shows as well?

Lee: Well, I guess we’ll see how this thing does. This is a lot of years of work. We have to make sure the audience is going to show up. We’ve done a lot of work there. This is certainly our biggest franchise. But we have two or three others that are in the top five in the world. It’ll be interesting to explore those as well.