In June it was announced that Seth Rogen and his long-time producing partner Evan Goldberg have teamed up with Nickelodeon for a CG-animated reboot movie of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In a recent interview with Collider, Rogen opened up on the upcoming project, revealing that their TMNT reboot will lean more towards a coming-of-age story that has been left out in previous adaptations.
“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,” Rogen said. “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.”
RELATED: Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood: Guadagnino to Helm Script by Rogen & Goldberg
The CG-animated project is set to be produced by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and James Weaver through their Point Grey Pictures banner and has landed Jeff Rowe (Gravity Falls, Connected) to helm the project while Brendan O’Brien (Neighbors: Sorority Rising) is attached to pen the script.
The new film will not only mark the first time in over a decade that a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film has been completely animated, it also marks the first-ever CG theatrical production for Nickelodeon Animation Studios, with Ramsey Naito, EVP of Animation Production and Development overseeing the project for Nickelodeon while Josh Fagen is overseeing for Point Grey Pictures.
RELATED: Sarah Silverman, Seth Rogen To Lead HBO Max Animated Series
Originally created in 1984 with the Mirage Studios comic book of the same name, the titular heroes were first brought to life on the small screen with the ’87 TV series before coming to the big screen in 1990 at New Line Cinema, with the film garnering major box office success and spawning a franchise of three films. After an initial CGI adaptation in 2007, the franchise would be revived in 2014 with a live-action/CGI hybrid theatrical film produced by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes and Paramount Pictures, with the first being panned by critics while the latter received better reviews than its predecessor, though was a commercial failure, leading to the scrapping of a third film.
A reboot was initially announced in 2018 with Bay, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller returning to produce and Andrew Dodge (Bad Words) set to pen the script, but after a year of development, co-creator Kevin Eastman confirmed in an interview that Paramount had taken the negative responses to the last two films “to heart” and that they were taking their time to deliver “next-level type of stuff.”
(Photo Credit: Getty Images)
