Another ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Reboot to Start Production This Year

Paramount Pictures is developing a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot to start production later this year, again under producers Michael Bay, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller’s Platinum Dunes production company, Variety reports.

“We’re doing a reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at Paramount. That is looking like production at the end of the year,” Form told Variety Sunday at the Critics’ Choice Awards.

“Did you just give something away?” Fuller said. “Oh boy. We did the preceding two Turtle movies, but I didn’t know that we were saying that we’re making it, but that’s good to know!”

Andrew Dodge (Bad Words, Space Jam 2) has been tapped to pen the script.

Bay and company last produced the 2014 reboot and its 2016 sequel, Out of the Shadows, which proved a disappointment with just $245 million earned worldwide. Both films starred Megan Fox (Transformers) and Will Arnett (Bojack Horseman) as the human allies to the underground pack of mutant superheroes, comprised of bandana-sporting brothers Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello.

The TMNT franchise, spawned by Kevin Eastman and Kevin Laird’s original comic book, has since been revived on the small screen with its fourth animated series, Nickelodeon’s Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Across six movies — five of them live-action, one a CG-animated big screen reboot that failed to take off in 2007 — the Turtles have earned more than $1 billion dollars in box office totals since their theatrical debut in 1990.

Paramount hopes to revive and refresh the franchise following the “rotten” scores earned by the previous two entries, both of which took a beating from critics with just a 22% and 37% critics’ approval, respectively, on Rotten Tomatoes.

Form and Fuller last produced horror hit A Quiet Place for Paramount, which has a sequel dated for 2020.