We’re about a month away from the release of Jonathan Liebesman’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a movie that has been hated on by many of the fanbase. If you’ve been following the production of this movie carefully, you’ll remember a time where the Turtles were going to be aliens and not born from Mutagen, but it looks like that has now all been laid to rest.
“They do become mutants because of Mutagen,” Liebesman said in an interview with Coming Soon. “For me, as a fan, it’s a very satisfying origin. We discussed, ‘Should we do the exact Eastman thing?’ The problem is, it becomes very complicated. People who aren’t fans will just be like, ‘What the f– is going on?’ There’s already so much complication in terms of Splinter being formed because he was Shredder’s nemesis who stole his girlfriend. It’s just that then you start opening a whole bunch of doors that became very complex to explore in this film.”
I think for me, the touchstones were April O’Neil, Shredder, the Turtles and Splinter,” he continued. “Make sure we see how they become turtles. Make sure they’re mutants. Make sure there’s pizza.”
There was a rumour earlier in the week that William Fichtner, who was confirmed to be playing Shredder, is in fact not playing the iconic villain, “William Fichtner isn’t Shredder,” Liebesman confirms. “[Fichtner] is Eric Sachs. Shredder is played by another actor. He’s not all CG. You see him without his armor on. When he’s in the armor, there’s an actor, but he’s been augmented. Like in ‘Iron Man,’ it’s CGI.”
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will be around 100 minutes long and Liebesman confirms a lot of pizza, cat videos on YouTube and nerdy humour. He even teased that we may hear the original cartoon theme song in the movie at some point.
Lastly, Liebesman discussed sequels and an expanded universe, “the thing there is that we had a very ambitious first draft,” he explains. “If we get to explore things further, there’s a lot of what I think you’re talking about.” Producer Andrew Form added, “There are also lot of characters in the canon that we would really, really love to work with. We wanted more. When we were doing concept art for the characters, obviously, we can’t afford every character in the first thing. But we definitely have drawings of them all!”
Read the full interview here.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is set for release on August 8th in the States and on October 17th in the UK, and is directed by Jonathan Liebesman (Wrath of the Titans), produced by Michael Bay (Transformers: Age of Extinction) and features a cast that includes Megan Fox (Transformers) as April O’Neil, Pete Ploszek (Parks and Recreation) and Johnny Knoxville (Jackass Presents Bad Grandpa) as Leonardo, Alan Ritchson (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire) as Raphael, Jeremy Howard (How the Grinch Stole Christmas) as Donatello, Noel Fisher (Battle Los Angeles) as Michaelangelo, William Fichtner (The Dark Knight) as Erich Sachs, Danny Woodburn (Seinfeld) and Tony Shalhoub (Monk) as Splinter, Will Arnett (The LEGO Movie) as Vernon Fenwick, Whoopi Goldberg (Ghost) as Bernadette Thompson, and K. Todd Freeman (The Dark Knight) as Baxter Stockman. Watch the latest trailer here.
Originally published July 18, 2014. Updated December 13, 2019.
