Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is returning to the big screen once again, and they’ll be rebooted once again as well. Nickelodeon’s next cinematic stab at the heroes in a half shell will be a completely CGI animated effort, and somewhat surprisingly, it will come from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Point Grey Pictures. Producer Rogen is looking to take a slightly different angle than that of previous films.
In speaking with Collider about the HBO Max movie American Pickle, Rogen was asked about the new CGI TMNT film and offered the following:
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.
Rogen is, of course, referring to the seminal coming-of-age film Superbad, and it makes one wonder how the four turtles would look trying to buy alcohol as McLovin. It is a fair point, though. Both the Michael Bay films relied far more on action than character introspection, and the previous CGI movie, TMNT, leaned heavier into lore than anything else.
You probably have to go as far back as the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film to find one where they actually felt and explored the fact that these ninjas turtles are still children of sorts. Though the TV show and comics have nailed this a few times over, there’s a lot left to explore on the film side of things with a coming-of-age take on these characters.
