The pizza-loving, weapon-wielding, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are back! Whether you’re a hardcore fan with all of the original comics and toys lined up in date release order, or just a passerby wondering why there are turtles named after Italian Renaissance figures we have you covered. We’ll cover the current movie – Mutant Mayhem – take you on a tour through the history of the franchise and make a pizza pit stop at key moments along the way. Let’s start with the buzz around the new movie.
What’s the plot of Mutant Mayhem?
“In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, after years of being sheltered from the human world, the Turtle brothers set out to win the hearts of New Yorkers and be accepted as normal teenagers through heroic acts.”
Alongside information from the official synopsis above there’s a lot interesting information for Turtles’ fans to add. It is reported that the movie will focus on the themes of fatherhood (yes, the movie includes Splinter), and family as well as tackling the difficulty of being a teenager. We can expect a whole slew of other mutant animals in the movie alongside the infamous villain Baxter Stockman. April O’Neil, the Turtle's first human friend, and ally, will also play a role in the movie as they seek to be understood by humans in New York City. Bringing these iconic characters to life is an incredible cast.
Cast and crew: Bringing the Turtles to life
This is the first movie in which actual teenagers are voicing the Turtles, marking a real shift toward the authentic experience of adolescence. After all, when you get four teenagers in a studio and ask them to improvise, you get something that a script can’t capture. Director of the movie Jeff Rowe told ScreenRant "They came to life, they talked over each other, and we immediately threw the script we had out and then had to start rewriting, to the way that they talked and improvised." Micah Abbey is Donatello, Shamon Brown Jr. is Michelangelo, Nicolas Cantu is Leonardo, and Brady Noon is Raphael.
Who else is starring in the movie?
The wider cast boasts some high-profile names but none seem more perfect than Jackie Chan taking on the role of Splinter. He is joined by The Bear star Ayo Edebiri who plays April O’Neil and Ice Cube in the role of Superfly. John Cena and movie writer Seth Rogen play villains Bebop and Rocksteady while Giancarlo Esposito voices Baxter Stockman. Maya Rudolph voices the character Cynthia Utrom.
There is room in the cast for a host of mutant animals such as Genghis Frog voiced by Hannibal Buress; mutant alligator, Leatherhead voiced by Ross Byrne; Natasia Demetriou’s mutant bat Wingnut; Post Malone voices the mutant manta ray, Ray Fillet; and Paul Rudd voices Mondo Gecko, a skater and mutant gecko. The legendary villain Shredder was originally in the movie but filmmaker Jeff Rowe explained to SlashFilm that he’s being saved for a potential sequel.
Who are the brains behind the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' latest adventure?
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem comes mostly from the minds of Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Jeff Rowe. Rogen and Goldberg are childhood friends who first collaborated on the 2007 hit movie, Superbad and went on to co-direct This is the End and The Interview. In an interview with Collider, Rogen admitted that he has been a “lifelong fan of Ninja Turtles” and has been involved in the marketing of the movie by releasing snippets and teasers through his Twitter page.
Jeff Rowe is making his directorial debut with this movie and previously wrote The Mitchells vs. the Machines and episodes on the Matt Groening TV show, Disenchanted. Story and screenplay credits also go to Detective Pikachu screenwriters Benji Samit and Dan Hernandez alongside Brandan O’Brien. Legendary composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross composed the score for the movie, which also has a soundtrack heavily influenced by classic 90s East Coast hip hop.
A teenage animation style for the Teenage Turtles
One of the most striking elements of the movie is the animation style. Production designer Yashar Kassai, known for his work on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is involved in crafting the movie’s unfinished teenage style. In an interview with Variety, he said “The thing that felt so wrong in the beginning was telling my very highly trained, skillful artists who are also ultra-talented that, because we’re drawing like teenagers, I need you to draw that again but I need you to peel away all those years you spent in art school learning your craft and draw like your 15-year-old self.” In the same interview, director Jeff Rowe stated “We decided we wanted this movie to look exactly like a concept artwork, and we want the concept artwork to feel distinctly human and not computer-generated”. The style of the movie, as seen in the trailers and posters, is reminiscent of the early comic sketches and harks back to the comic book origin of the Turtles.
Where did the Mutant Ninja Turtles come from?
Comic book artists Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a way to parody existing comic books at the time. Makes sense right? Talking teenage turtles that are trained in the ninja arts by a giant rat and who were exposed to a radioactive ooze as babies causing them to grow up as mutants – it’s not the premise of people taking themselves too seriously. The wackiness of the Turtles however captured the imagination of children who made the franchise a success by purchasing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle toys. A whole generation of kids grew up knowing the names of Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello, and Michelangelo, not as Renaissance artists, but as half-shell turtles with exceptional abilities and a love of pizza.
The franchise made a smooth transition to television with the first animated series being released in 1987 and running for 10 seasons. It would spawn four animated series in total and one live-action series titled Ninja Turtles:The Next Mutation. In between the release of different television shows, the Turtles have also graced the big screen on multiple occasions.
How does Mutant Mayhem compare to other Ninja Turtles films?
Mutant Mayhem is the seventh Ninja Turtles film overall with the first iteration of the characters on the big screen premiering in 1990. The original trilogy of live-action movies included Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III. While the first movie was a huge commercial success both follow-ups floundered with bad reviews and mediocre box office performance. The Turtles' big-screen dreams were dashed until their next appearance in the mid-2000s.
The animated reboot TMNT was released in 2007. It featured Chris Evans, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Patrick Stewart, and Laurence Fishburne amongst others. It was a moderate success but spawned no further movies and the Turtles went back into hiding. In 2014 and later 2016, two Michael Bay-produced movies brought the Turtles back to live-action. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows were both critically panned and made very little impact. Despite that, the characters remain beloved and without a majorly successful film adaptation in the last thirty years, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem has it all to play for. With a sequel already announced and a new TV show in the works at Paramount+, a new era for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has seemingly begun. Cowabunga!
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem will release on August 2nd, 2023.