Just the other day we ran a report about the failure of Battleship.
Of course, TG couldn’t help but make the remark that even with the economy in bad shape, you wouldn’t want to work at Universal after a bomb that big goes off, because who knows who’s going to get fired in its wake?
We saw the chairman of Disney lose his job over John Carter, there’s budget concerns with The Lone Ranger over at the mouse house as well, and now there’s a lot of trouble over at Paramount with three major films in various states of disrepair.
We just reported on the site that World War Z had to be postponed, with a big reshoot scheduled for September, and Star Trek 2 / Prometheus screenwriter Damon Lindelof being called in to do a major rewrite on the third act.
The studio also did a big postponement on the next G.I. Joe film, which was supposed to come out this summer, leaving Paramount without a big tentpole picture this season. Now comes word that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reboot has been shut down, the ones that fanboys were railing against since day one.
According to Variety, Ninka Turtles was in pre-production for an October start, but the movie has now been postponed, and the release date’s been moved from Christmas 2013 to May 16, 2014. Apparently, there will be a script rewrite during the shutdown in a desperate attempt to improve the story, and to try and bring the budget down as well.
As Variety tells us, the word from “studio insiders” is the studio “has been adamant about bringing in projects at a certain budget. While the studio has faced all these delays for future films, Paramount has not had to contend with a mega flop in recent years.”
Michael Bay’s company Platinum Dunes was behind the new Ninja Turtles, and he’s had to battle an enormous amount of hostility from the fans because of the changes he wanted to make to the story, like the Turtles being aliens, and a title change to just Ninja Turtles.
Robbie Rist, who was the voice of Michaelangelo in the original Ninja Turtles even went crazy publicly, warning the fans that Bay would be “sodomizing” and “rap[ing] our childhood memories.” Bay then responded to the geeks on his blog to “chill,” and that promised not to let them down.
The Hollywood Reporter confirms the current preproduction staff has been laid off for an “indefinite” amount of time, where another source told the Reporter things are going to be on hold for ten weeks. So is this a good thing that the Turtles will have more time to develop, or is this a bad omen of what’s to come? Who knows at the moment, but maybe it’s better to be safe than sorry with such a classic geek franchise.
