Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is getting rebooted, yet again. But this time, as reported by Deadline, Nickelodeon is adapting the Heroes in a Half-Shell into a theatrical animated feature, produced by Seth Rogen out of all people!
Rogen will be producing the Ninja Turtles reboot movie alongside Evan Goldberg, James Weaver, and his production company Point Grey Pictures. Point Grey previously had animated success with the 2016 adult comedy toon Sausage Party, which Rogen and Goldberg wrote and produced.
For the reboot’s screenplay, Point Grey has recruited Brendan O’Brien, writer of Rogen’s produced-and-starred Neighbors movies. Commanding the Turtles in the director’s chair will be Jeff Rowe, best known as one of the writers of Disney’s Gravity Falls, and the co-writer/co-director of Sony Pictures Animation’s upcoming Connected.
A Ninja Turtles fan from childhood, Rowe announced his involvement with the reboot through Twitter:
Releasing through Paramount Pictures, this reboot will be the first CG-theatrical production coming directly from Nickelodeon Animation Studios. Ramsey Naito, Nickelodeon’s EVP of Animation Production and Development, will be overseeing production.
Brain Robbins, the president of ViacomCBS’ Kids & Family division, issued the following statement of the animated reboot movie:
“Adding Seth, Evan and James’ genius to the humor and action that’s already an integral part of TMNT is going to make this a next-level reinvention of the property. I’m looking forward to see 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.”
Brian Robbins, President, Kids & Family, ViacomCBS
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles first made their splash into pop culture in 1984 with the comic books by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, as well as the iconic late-80s animated series. These were followed by three live-action movies released by New Line Cinema in the early-90s which grossed a combined $323.2 million worldwide. A second animated series aired in the early 2000s, and in 2007, a theatrical computer-animated Turtles feature, simply titled TMNT, was released by Warner Bros. and animated by Hong Kong’s Imagi Studios.
Since Nickelodeon acquired the franchise in 2009, two animated series have been produced for the channel, including the CG-animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012-2017), and the 2D-animated Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2018-present). Additionally, in the mid-2010s, Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies released two live-action Ninja Turtles movies, both produced by Michael Bay, and grossed $730.6 million worldwide combined.
Paramount’s announcement of an animated Ninja Turtles movie provides a further outlook on an interesting direction they’re taking with their popular film franchises. Two months earlier, the studio announced a fully-animated Transformers prequel to be directed by Toy Story 4‘s Josh Cooley.
