The heroes in a half-shell are set to return.... Again. Seth Rogen announced some seriously bodacious news via Twitter about the upcoming CG-animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot.
The actor posted a photo of a page supposedly snagged from Leonardo’s journal, where, amongst a series of scrawls and doodles, a few clues are hidden:
#TMNT pic.twitter.com/NXAIufxYMeJune 1, 2021
Notes about his turtle brothers, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Donatello are present, alongside scrawls about various turtle mutations. In the margins he references apologizing to April – that’s April O’Neill, a reporter and friend to the four.
By far the biggest reveal is the movie’s release date: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is set to arrive in theaters on August 11, 2023. Variety adds that The Mitchells vs. The Machines writer and co-director Jeff Rowe will helm the movie from a script by Brendan O’Brien.
Rogen will produce this modern take on the sewer-dwelling turts alongside his long-term producing partner Evan Goldberg. The duo wrote and directed comedies Superbad and Pineapple Express, proof their stoner humor is the perfect match for the turtles’ comedy stylings. It’ll be interesting to see how much sway they have over the script.
Back when the project was announced in August 2020, Rogen spoke of how the teenage aspect of the characters is what appealed most to him: “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,” he told Collider last summer.
“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.”
This upcoming reboot will be the seventh movie outing for the quartet, who originally started life on the pages of a self-published comic back in 1984. The turtles made the transition to the big screen with 1990’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a cult classic pic that made $200 million worldwide. Two sequels followed along with an animated pic in 2007. Michael Bay then relaunched the franchise in 2014 with a live-action remake starring Megan Fox as reporter April O’Neill, and its 2016 sequel, Out of the Shadows which is by far the worst-performing of all the Turtles movies.
Let's raise a slice and hope this upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot fares better when it hits theaters in 2023.
