Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 Won’t Happen Says Out Of The Shadows Producer

Andrew Form is one of the producers that worked on 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and its 2016 sequel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, and during a recent interview, he said he doesn’t think Paramount will move forward with a third installment in that live-action film series.

“I don’t think there’s Turtles 3,” Form told Collider, “but I wouldn’t say there’s never going to be another Turtles movie.”

As you can guess, much of the reason there probably won’t be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 is because of the poor box office performance from Out of the Shadows. Its $35.3 million opening was down 45% from the first film’s $65.6 million debut; more importantly, its $245.6 million box office total was down 50% from its predecessor’s $493.3 million global cume. It also didn’t help that top critics on Rotten Tomatoes only gave it a rating of 28%, and while that is a major improvement from the 9 percent its predecessor received from top critics, it’s still overwhelmingly negative.

“We were obviously surprised at the box office results,” Form shared. “We loved the movie. We loved making the movie. From our first Super Bowl teaser to everything we launched, we felt so good about our material, and for some reason it did not find the audience that the first movie found. And we talk about it all the time, and we tried to figure it out, but we cannot put our finger on what happened. We really can’t. It’s just one of those things where we feel like we made a really great movie; we thought at the time that our release date was great, and we added all these new characters with Bebop and Rocksteady and Baxter Stockwell had a big role in the movie and Casey Jones and for some reason when it came to opening weekend…Even before the movie came out, we were feeling great. And you wake up two days before the movie opens and you go, “Wow, I don’t know if this movie is tracking as well as it should.” Then you hope, and then Thursday night happens and your midnights come in and you’re like, “That’s not what Movie 1 did,” and then sure enough your weekend comes and it’s nowhere near what anyone thought, and it’s nowhere near Movie 1, and, before you know it, it’s over. We’re still so proud of the movie; it just didn’t find an audience. We really don’t know why.”

Michelangelo, Donatello, Leonardo, and Raphael return to theaters this summer to battle bigger, badder villains, alongside April O’Neil (Megan Fox), Vern Fenwick (Will Arnett), and a newcomer: the hockey-masked vigilante Casey Jones (Stephen Amell). After supervillain Shredder escapes custody, he joins forces with mad scientist Baxter Stockman (Tyler Perry) and two dimwitted henchmen, Bebop (Gary Anthony Williams) and Rocksteady (WWE Superstar Stephen “Sheamus” Farrelly), to unleash a diabolical plan to take over the world. As the Turtles prepare to take on Shredder and his new crew, they find themselves facing an even greater evil with similar intentions: the notorious Krang.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows was directed by Dave Green and starred Megan Fox, Will Arnett, Brad Garrett, Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, Pete Ploszek, Jeremy Howard, Stephen Amell, Tyler Perry, Brian Tee, Laura Linney, Sheamus, and Gary Anthony Williams.