Well, well, well.
After reading a report yesterday that was denied up and down by several sources (including Michael Bay, but I have personally learned you cannot trust Michael Bat when he’s talking about Michael Bay properties) that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles re-boot was getting as much as one third of it’s plot tossed out the window. The report continued to suggest that the release date for the movie could be pushed back because of the amount of work left to be done.
Paramount denied it, Michael Bay denied it, really only one outlet (Geeks of Doom) was suggesting it was happening. Like a lot of denials, we took it at face value considering it wasn’t our story and it wasn’t our source. That was yesterday.
This morning, the Instagram account of Alan Ritchson, who is playing Raphael in TMNT posted himself getting the ol’ mo-cap suit back out and Just Jared has Megan Fox back on the Los Angeles set as April O’Neil.
This is after fan reaction to the first TMNT teaser had “real fans” straight up re-designing the Turtle designs we only got glimpses of (check those out here) to align more with the “classic” Turtles look.
Of course, big complex movies have re-shoots all the time that don’t toss out a third of the story. Also, Megan Fox was very recently pregnant, so this might just be things she was too pregnant for before (April fighting, running, jumping, we’d call them ‘pickups’ in the industry). However, when I reviewed what Michael Bay erroneously called a version of the script he had nothing to do with, the fan outrage over that was enough to pull back from the alien/Dimension X angle altogether, which you think would make them toss the whole story out. Imagine my surprise when I saw the teaser and Raphael is thrown into a humvee in a snow-y environment…exactly like in the opening of that supposedly abandoned script.
I was on set for TMNT and I don’t know when I’m going to be able to bring you news from that set, but I was allowed to mention I was there:
Now, almost a year later, a lot of what I was impressed with has been rolled out to the general public in less-than-interesting ways. I can’t stand behind asking you to lower your anxiety level anymore, because I’m getting anxious.
Shredder and April’s parents making the Turtles seems really weird. And that’s coming from me who loved the last cinematic entry in the franchise that featured Patrick Stewart collecting mythical Monsters Inc looking creatures from around New York.
The Turtles and their stories are malleable (I saw the Out of Their Shells Tour in Denver back in the day, I know what bad Turtles looks like), but goodwill is based purely on the feeling that we’re being honored and not screwed as TMNT and blockbuster film fans.
The public face of this film has mostly been telling me to go ***** myself, and I’m not sure having Pizza Hut delivered to my boss is going to make me feel better about having no idea what’s going on with my heroes in a half shell.
So what do you think, how much can I trust this movie?
