TheTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtlesbrand has been alive and thriving for years now. Comics, shows, merchandise and, of course, feature films. There was a pretty significant gap in the wide release department between 1993’sTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IIIand 2007’sTMNT, but since then, we’ve been getting a newNinja Turtlesmovie fairly regularly. Paramount Pictures went big in 2014 with their live-action, motion capture reboot,Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. While that film did wind up earning a sequel, when 2016’sTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadowsonly took in $245.6 million on a reported $135 million production budget, that seemed to spell the end of that iteration of the franchise. But, this isNinjas Turtleswe’re talking about here! There had to be another go.
Sure enough, inJune of 2018, news broke that Paramount was working on anotherNinja Turtlesmovie with the Platinum Dunes team -Michael Bay,Andrew Form, andBrad Fuller. However, inJune of 2020we got word that the plan was actually to make a CGI reboot with Nickelodeon and Point Grey Pictures, which is overseen bySeth RogenandEvan Goldberg. While chatting with Rogen for his upcoming HBO Max release,American Pickle, I asked him what it is about hisNinja Turtlesmovie that’ll make it stand out from the rest. Here’s what he said:
“As a lifelong fan of Ninja Turtles, weirdly the ‘Teenage’ part of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was always the part that stuck out to me the most. And as someone who loves teenage movies, and who’s made a lot of teenage movies, and who literally got their start in their entire profession by writing a teenage movie, the idea of kind of honing in on that element was really exciting to us. I mean, not disregarding the rest, but really using that as kind of a jumping off point for the film.”
As a diehardNinjaTurtlesfan, I’ll take anyTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtlesadaptation I can get. But, given the strength of the coming-of-age films in Rogen’s filmography, the idea of him really embracing the “teenage” quality of the characters seems like a promising route to take, especially when the 2014 and 2016 movies had a grittier feel to them.
