It worked for Spider-Man, and now maybe it’ll work for the heroes in a half-shell. Paramount and Nickelodeon are teaming up for yet another reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
This time around it’s a theatrical, CG-animated film produced by Point Grey Pictures, the Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg-founded company responsible for projects like This Is the End, Sausage Party, and . Jeff Rowe (Gravity Falls, Disenchantment) will direct, and Brendan O’Brian (Neighbours) is writing the script.
“Adding Seth, Evan, and James’ [Weaver, president] genius to the humour and action that’s already an integral part of TMNT is going to make this a next-level reinvention of the property,” Brian Robbins, head of Kids & Family for ViacomCBS said in a statement to Deadline, which broke the news. “I’m looking forward to [seeing] what they do, and I know that Ramsey Naito and her team are excited to take the Nick Animation Studio into another great direction with their first-ever CG-animated theatrical.”
We know what you’re thinking: wasn’t there an animated Ninja Turtles movie relatively recently? Yes. Yes, there was. Warner Bros. had the rights for a while, and did an animated movie in 2007, called TMNT. A few years later, we got not one, but two new live-action movies from Paramount. This is now yet another reboot, not even mentioning the direct-to-video and streaming efforts such as Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series on Netflix or the other theatrical reboot potentially happening at Paramount.
That’s a lot of Ninja Turtles, but we’ve seen what a popular franchise can become in the hands of talented filmmakers like Rogen and Goldberg. Don’t forget, in the middle of the whole Homecoming/Endgame/Far From Home saga there was an animated Spider-Man movie called Into the Spider-Verse, which was basically the fourth big-screen reinvention of that character in less than two decades. That worked out pretty well, and we think Ninja Turtles could enjoy a similar fate. Rogen and Goldberg are known for their subversive, crowd-pleasing takes, and one has to assume they’re going to bring that to Leo, Donnie, Mikey, and Raph.