It’s been nine years since Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows ended the most recent attempt to get live-action/CGI Turtles off the ground, not with a bang, but a Brad Garrett-voiced whimper. The 2016 film’s tepid box-office performance killed the Turtles revival that Michael Bay jumpstarted back in 2014, relegating the Turtles, both on TV, and in theaters, back into their less bulge-y, more animated forms. But the cycle can never truly end, and so THR reports today that Neal H. Moritz, the producer behind Paramount’s Sonic The Hedgehog film franchise, is in talks to bring these Ninjutsu-wielding teen heroes back into our world for a third distinct time.
Paramount is apparently eager to get the Turtles franchise running again for the pretty basic reason that the studio owns the brand outright, and is thus able to exploit it with mercenary glee. (Starting by an apparent effort to clean house on previous efforts, including canceling TV series Tales Of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and shuttering plans for an R-rated adaptation of grim post-apocalyptic Turtles comic The Last Ronin.) While a sequel to 2023’s animated, and well-received, Mutant Mayhem is still on the books for 2027, the studio is apparently desperate to make a live-action Turtles movie that functions the same as the Sonic films: Family-friendly action-adventure that can bring in increasingly hefty box office bounties. (The most recent Sonic movie, last year’s Sonic The Hedgehog 3, brought in nearly $500 million, a franchise high.)
Hence Moritz, who’s famous for his work on the Fast And The Furious movies, but who’s also the lead executives on the Jeff Fowler-directed Sonic flicks. Moritz is reportedly in negotiations to take over the Turtles franchise, with an eye toward—not our terminology, sorry—”Sonic-fy-ing” them for mass consumption. It’s not clear, exactly, what that would entail, but we’re guessing it won’t involve turning them back into the incredibly bulky landmasses from the Bay-produced films.
