Michael Bay Ninja Turtles Movie Starts Shooting In April

By Rudie Obias | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

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It has begun! After months of being on “indefinite” hiatus, the Michael Bay-produced Ninja Turtles film will start principal photography this April in New York City. And while it remains to be seen if the fan-enraging rumors about the script have been changed or addressed, there is one glimmer of hope in the tweet below from Production Weekly: it looks like the movie is going back to the full original title, rather than simply “Ninja Turtles.”

For many, the rumored departures the leaded script took from the source material fundamentally changed what fans have come to love about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Our gang of four was no longer “Teenage” nor “Mutant,” and screenwriters Kevin Eastman (TMNT co-creator) and Andre Nemec & Josh Appelbaum (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol) had changed the Turtles mutants to space aliens. The script was also said to be very campy, with lots of references to current pop culture, rather than the darker take some fans were hoping for.

The problems with the script were so bad that Paramount Pictures put the Ninja Turtles project on “indefinite” hiatus until a new and improved script could be produced. The movie studio also pushed back the film’s release date from December 2013 to May 2014 to accommodate the revisions. Now that, at least, the title of the film has changed back to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, this could be seen as a sign of good faith to fans of the long-running animated series and comic book.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will (theoretically) hit theaters everywhere on May 16, 2014.