Remember the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Well, they’re back in movie form! Or they will be, according to Paramount, who announced last night that comedy movie legend Seth Rogen is working on bringing a new version of the teenage turtle team to the big screen in 2023.
Rogen animated movie reboot was first announced back in 2020, but this is the first solid update we’ve had about the project in some time. Deadline first broke the news that Rogen was producing the film. Jeff Rowe of Gravity Falls fame is directing using a script from Brendan O’Brien, who’d previously collaborated with Rogen on Bad Neighbours.
In an interview with Collider, Rogen said he plans to focus on the “teenage” element of the characters. “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,” Rogen explained. “I mean, not disregarding the rest, but really using that as a kind of jumping-off point for the film.”
In a tweet, Rogen also shared some rough notes for the film in the form of an in-universe letter from the Turtle’s leader Leonardo.
#TMNT pic.twitter.com/NXAIufxYMe
— Seth Rogen (@Sethrogen) June 1, 2021
While it’s difficult to decipher the scrawl we can see that the film will have a focus on honour, loyalty, and discipline (or at least Leo thinks it will), three concepts the Turtle’s master, Splinter, has drilled into his wards.
According to Paramount, after the release of Rogen’s Turtle movie, there are plans to do an animated series focusing on the film’s villains. We presume this means Shredder and the Foot Clan (maybe even Krang?), but we don’t know the specifics.