Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’s Seth Rogen is reassuring fans the upcoming animated film won’t have any “boring” scenes.
Speaking with Empire, Rogen touched on what fans can expect out of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which releases in August 2023. “The film itself is permeated with this teenage energy – where you don’t stay in the lines, and you’re pushing harder on the stuff that you like, and you’re impressionably scribbling in the background,” Rogen said. “We started to write to the animation style. It needed to capture that – we can never have boring scenes, because the movie itself just seems to be crackling with energy.”
Rogen, who co-wrote the screenplay for the movie alongside Evan Goldberg, director Jeff Rowe, Dan Hernandez, and Genji Samit, added, “Part of the reason I did karate was because of the Ninja Turtles. Me and Evan both did karate together. My dad got me nunchucks that I cracked my head open with, because I was obsessed with the Ninja Turtles, and Michelangelo specifically.”
TMNT: The Heroes in a Half-Shell Enter a New Era With Mutant Mayhem
Originally created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird in 1984, the four heroes in a half-shell made their theatrical debut in 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Two sequels followed, 1991’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze and 1993’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, before 2007 brought about an animated remake, TMNT. In 2014, the turtles returned to live-action with the Michael Bay-produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which was followed by a 2016 sequel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows.
The official synopsis for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem reads, “After years of being sheltered from the human world, the Turtle brothers set out to win the hearts of New Yorkers and be accepted as normal teenagers through heroic acts. Their new friend April O’Neil helps them take on a notorious crime syndicate, but they soon get in over their heads when an army of mutants is unleashed upon them.”
With a voice cast that includes Micah Abbey, Sharon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, Brady Noon, Rogen, Paul Rudd, Maya Rudolph, Giancarlo Esposito, Ayo Edebiri, Ice Cube, Jackie Chan, John Lena, Rose Byrne, Hannibal Buress, and more, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem releases theatrically in the United States on Aug. 2, 2023.
