A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles writer wants to reboot the '90s movies with a new sequel
For decades, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise in its various forms has taught children about Renaissance artists, van-mounted manhole cover launchers, and the transformative properties of toxic ooze, but one of the screenwriters on the original 1990 Ninja Turtles movie hopes that the brand’s future lies in going back to the days of men in turtle suits trying to pull off fight scenes. Speaking with ComicBook.com (via /Film), writer Bobby Herbeck says he’s talked to Steve Barron (who directed the 1990 movie) and Brian Henson (son of Jim Henson, whose Creature Shop developed the original turtle suits) about making another Turtles movies, and it sounds like they’d be into it if a movie studio came along and decided to give them money for it.
He doesn’t say much about what he’d like to see in this hypothetical Turtles movie, but the implication is that it would be a return to the original timeline of the live-action movies before the Michael Bay-produced reboot with CG turtles opposite human actors. He also teases that Brian Henson would be able to do all sorts of “amazing” stuff with modern technology to make the costumes look less… like puppets with people inside? It actually might be kind of hard to avoid that, since these turtles are teenage mutants and therefore shouldn’t look especially normal, so maybe Brian Henson should do the same thing his dad did and just remake those same costumes?
Meanwhile, podcast fans might recognize that rebooting the original Ninja Turtles movie series is part of the premise for We Have To Stop Talkin’ TMNT On CBB with comedian Shaun Diston and Comedy Bang Bang host Scott Aukerman, but (spoiler alert) it has since moved into being about some kind of reboot of the Coming Out Of Their Shells stage show that the Ninja Turtles did. That means Herbeck should be free to make this thing without weirdo comedy podcast fans complaining—assuming, again, the any movie studio actually agrees to fund this thing. Also, it’s worth pointing out that Seth Rogen was attached to produce a new Turtles movie just this summer, so the odds of this happening are pretty slim if that project is actually moving forward.