In 2016, many fans of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were disappointed when a lackluster response to Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out Of The Shadows meant the latest live-action iteration of the heroes in a half-shell came to a premature end. Now the popular franchise is potentially getting two new reboots, one of which is coming from Seth Rogen, who announced a CGI animated movie would be released on August 11th, 2023. It now appears that Paramount Pictures are making a surprise move of pulling the release date forward to August 4th.

Recently several Paramount movies, including the latest installments of the Mission: Impossible franchise, have found themselves slipping back in release schedules by months or even a year, and it seems that this could be partly responsible for the shift in the Ninja Turtles latest outing. With cinema releases for 2023 filling up with big releases, another movie releasing around the 11th would likely provide a bit more competition than Paramount are happy with.

Rogen’s CGI movie will be the first animated movie since 2007’s TMNT, which gained reasonable reviews but just didn’t quite fill that desire for a new live-action iteration of the franchise, which led to Michael Bay’s first Turtles movie in 2014 and its sequel two years later. Although Bay’s movies did bring classic characters like Krang, Rocksteady and Beebop to a live-action movie for the first time, and all in all the movie played out on screen like a big budget Saturday morning cartoon, there was just something that didn’t sit well with audiences and certainly not with critics.

Seth Rogen’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie Will Go In Different Direction to the Live-Action Movies

Nickelodeon Renews Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for Season 4
Nickelodeon

Back in June, Rogan teased the movie with a Twitter image showing a page from Turtles’ leader Leonardo’s notebook which revealed the original release date for the project. With a number of little Turtle-based Easter eggs hidden in it, the image was enough to raise some interest in the film, and it will be interesting to see the different direction his latest movie heads in considering how Michael Bay’s movies were criticized for taking themselves too seriously and being too dark.

In a way, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise has suffered through its most well-known iteration, which was the 1987 cartoon series. The bright and bouncy series that saw many wacky mutants and situations put in front of the Turtles was starkly disjointed from the dark comic book origins, and even the original Jim Henson Company movies which were said to be too violent for children.

Whether Rogen’s take on the franchise can manage to please fans of the comics, the cartoon and the previous live-action movies is something that seems unlikely, but with backing from Nickelodeon and Rogen describing the film as a coming of age film aimed at teens and kids, those hoping for something dark and violent may want to steer clear of this iteration and await the live-action movie being developed by Colin and Casey Jost, which will once again be produced by Michael Bay.