Seth Rogen is a busy guy right now, and what’s on his plate is pretty diverse. There’s the new HBO movie An American Pickle, there’s him writing a movie about Classic Hollywood fix-’em-upper Scotty Bowers for Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino. And if that weren’t enough, he’s making a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated movie reboot. Granted, he’s not writing or directing it; it’s his company that’s working on it. But he did recently clarify the angle his team will be taking on the longtime product.
Talking to Collider, Rogen said the movie will focus on one of the title’s words more than the others.
“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,” Rogen said, “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.”
He added, “I mean, not disregarding the rest, but really using that as a kind of jumping off point for the film.”
The film is being made in part with Nickelodeon, and Jeff Rowe — co-director of the forthcoming Phil Lord-Chris Miller movie Connected — is set to direct a script written by Brendan O’Brien, who worked on another Rogen movie, Neighbors.
Since few of the many incarnations of TMNT really stress the teen aspect of it — beyond a love of pizza and dumb catchphrases — that’s a novel approach. Indeed, perhaps the only version that’s ever really dealt with their age is the recent SNL parody entitled “Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
(Via Collider)