Considering the early reaction from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fans towards producer Michael Bay and director Jonathan Liebesman’s planned feature film reboot, it’s unlikely that too many tears were shed when Paramount announced last month that it was temporarily shutting down pre-production on Ninja Turtles and bumping the film back from a Christmas Day 2013 release to May 2014. But don’t be fooled into thinking this delay is the first step towards the eventual collapse of the project – it seems that Ninja Turtles remains very much on the studio’s radar, and TMNT co-creator Kevin Eastman attempted to alleviate some fears at the San Diego Comic-Con last weekend during an interview with MTV Geek…
“From what I’ve seen, it’s easily the best Turtle movie yet. We’re talking The Raid: Redemption-style fight scenes; we’re talking about epic Rise of the Planet of the Apes sort of effects… I know that Michael [Bay] and his group really like [the new ‘alien’ origin] and that Paramount was supportive of that, so I think it’s great. I grew up reading Captain America and The Avengers and all that stuff, and over the course of the comic book history, since Avengers has been around, how many times has it been reinvented, reformatted, restructured, replatformed? Every person that’s grown up inspired by that material wants to put their stamp on it a little bit. It just keeps getting better and better, and to have that opportunity is pretty awesome.”
In fairness to Bay, Eastman makes a valid point here and Ninja Turtles certainly won’t be the first comic book property to undergo changes to its characters and their origins. It may however be the most drastic, given that the ‘teenage’ and ‘mutant’ aspects account for fifty percent of what makes the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But hey, on the plus side, at least we might finally get to see Krang, Rocksteady and Bebop on the big screen… or some variation thereof.
