Director Jeff Rowe compared Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem to the Academy Award-nominated classics Stay with me And Lady Bird…but of course with added ninja turtles. Speak with richwho also revealed a new image from the animated outing, has given Rowe more insight into how Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem will be “the ultimate coming-of-age movie for teens.”
“We wanted it to be like Stand By Me and Lady Bird. But, you know, with Ninja Turtles.”
The fact that the mutant ninja turtles are teenagers features a young cast of new talent and will play a huge part in the plot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. As Jeff Rowe explains it…
“They have a lot of that inauthentic confidence that teenagers have: as a teenager, you don’t know any better, so you operate with this wrought-up feeling of, ‘We can do anything!'”
Producers and co-writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have done such an accurate look at teenage life before, with the pair incorporating their own teenage experiences into the hit 2007 comedy. Super bad. And according to Rowe, it’s thanks to the involvement of Rogen and Goldberg that this latest version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is so authentic.
“That’s something that [they] are great at. That Superbad thing where they’re best friends but they’re kind of losers who make fun of each other but you don’t doubt for a second that they really love each other.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem hits theaters in August
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem picks up with the brothers after years of shelter from the humans. Donatello, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael wanted to win the hearts of the New York people with their heroic deeds and be accepted as normal teenagers. The turtles’ new friend, April O’Neil, also aids them in their deeds by pitting them against a mysterious crime syndicate, but they soon run into trouble when confronted by an army of mutants.
Based on the cartoon characters created by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem acts as a restart for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise and features an all-star cast led by Micah Abbey as Donatello, Nicolas Cantu as Leonardo, Brady Noon as Raphael, Shamon Brown Jr. as Michelangelo and Ayo Edebiri as April O’Neil. The rest of the cast includes John Cena as Rocksteady, Seth Rogen as Bebop, Giancarlo Esposito as Baxter Stockman, and Jackie Chan as Splinter, as well as appearances by Hannibal Buress, Rose Byrne, Ice Cube, Natasia Demetriou, Post Malone, Paul Rudd. , and Maya Rudolph.
Directed by Jeff Rowe in his feature film debut and co-directed by Kyler Spears from a screenplay by Rowe, Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem will debut at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on June 12, 2023.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem will then be released in theaters in the United States on August 4, 2023.