Seth Rogen recently announced a reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Paramount and Nickelodeon. The 38-year-old actor and director, who got his start as a teenager in Judd Apatow’s cult television series Freaks and Geeks, sees the new project as a coming-of-age story.

“As a lifelong fan of Ninja Turtles, weirdly the ‘Teenage’ part of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was always the part that stuck out to me the most, and as someone who loves teenage movies, and who’s made a lot of teenage movies, and who literally got their start in their entire profession by writing a teenage movie, the idea of kind of honing in on that element was really exciting to us,” Rogen said.

The CG animated film is the latest attempt to adapt the comic created by by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird and published by Mirage Studios in 1984. The last film released was 2016’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, which received mixed reviews and was a box-office bomb, earning $245 million against a $135 million budget. A sequel to that film was eventually scrapped.

Now, Rogen plans to breathe new life into the franchise along with his Evan Goldberg, his creative partner. The new film will be the second animated film in the franchise after 2007’s TMNT, which was considered a commercial success. Directed by Connected co-director Jeff Lowe and penned by Neighbors screenwriter Brendan O’Brien, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has been described as a “next-level reinvention of the property” by Nickelodeon president Brian Robbins.

The first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles console game was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) by Konami in 1989. Although the popularity of the games decreased in the 1990s, the franchise eventually developed into Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tournament Fighters, a one-on-one fighting game series. In 2016, a free-to-play RPG, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Legends, based on the 2012 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV series, was released for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Kindle Fire.

Given Rogen’s comedic chops and quirky perspective, it is likely that he will be able to successfully reinvent the film franchise and even revitalize future game incarnations. The actor, who co-wrote 2007’s Superbad with Goldberg, has been praised for his handling of teenage life in his films. On Rotten Tomatoes, where the film has an 88% approval rating, the film is described as “an authentic take on friendship and the overarching awkwardness of the high school experience." Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will undoubtedly also reflect what it means to be a teenager, albeit an amphibious one.

Source: IGN, Collider

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