How To Break a Franchise: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, once a beloved franchise featuring four oversized, stoned turtles who practiced martial arts, is being redone into a live action remake. The movie is set for release in 2012, and is rumored to be directed by Spike Jonze, director of movies such as Where The Wild Things Are and Being John Malkovich.

While Spike Jonze is talented, he is way too serious to be taking on the likes of a new Ninja Turtles movie. I, myself was excited to find out that the franchise was being reborn after it was massacred as a children's CGI movie WITHOUT Shredder.

The ninja turtles are primarily geared to aim towards a late teenage to college-age demographic. There are more than subtle suggestions that all these guys do is smoke weed, eat pizza, and are given instructions from an opium-addicted mutant rat. If that's not Adult Swim material for the collegiate pot smokers in the world, I don't know what is.

My theory is that Spike Jonze will try to make the Ninja Turtles into a semi-dramatic statement about a poverty-stricken culture instead of writing about what the Ninja Turtles truly represent: Fun.

My suggestion? Create a show that doesn't suggest, but instead graphically shows four guys dressed up as these turtles (think Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret of the Ooze) smoking weed and pranking pizza delivery guys in the East Village. Be sure to give it a TVMA rating so you can go wild with content and popularize the franchise all over again for who it was intended for. Hollywood shouldn't always go after the easy buck by appealing to toddlers and impressionable kids. Sometimes Hollywood needs to roll the dice and show a different side to things. It might just be what ultimately saves the industry...