Michael Bay’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Was Almost Much Worse

2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was certainly a controversial film when it came out. Produced by Michael Bay, the film was the first live-action film from the popular multimedia Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise in 21 years after 1993’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III and the CGI animated reboot TMNT in 2007. From the second audiences got a good look at the realistically designed heroes in a half shell, the buzz building up to the movie was rather negative, and following how controversial Michael Bay’s adaptations of the Transformers franchise were, his involvement in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sent worries for everyone.

Despite terrible reviews, the movie was a major box office hit, grossing an impressive $65 million in its opening weekend and holding the number one spot for two weeks before closing its run with $191 million domestic and $485 million worldwide. There was no goodwill, though, and the 2016 sequel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, was a box office bomb despite being a marked improvement. For all the criticism leveled at the 2014 film, the movie actually could have been a lot worse, as the original plan was the movie was going to alter the Turtle’s backstories drastically and even make them aliens. Here is what almost went wrong with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Alien Interdimensional Ninja Turtles

In 2009, Nickelodeon, which is a subsidiary of Paramount Media Company, purchased the rights to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise and planned both a new television series and a feature film. In 2010, they brought on Michael Bay, who was coming off directing both Transformers and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen for Paramount Pictures, to act as a producer for the movie through his production company Platinum Dunes, with co-producers Andrew Form and Brad Fuller. Platinum Dunes was best known for horror remakes like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. On March 16, 2012, during the Nickelodeon upfronts, Michael Bay revealed the title for the movie would be Ninja Turtles and that the turtles themselves would be from an alien race.

Fan reaction to this revelation was immediately negative, with Robbie Rist, who voiced Michelangelo in the first three live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films, accusing Michael Bay of “sodomizing” the franchise, which he later said was over the line. While some fans originally assumed that Michael Bay misspoke and that the film was going to adapt the original Mirage Comics storyline of having the TCRI ooze that created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles being of alien origin, that seemed to be more wishful thinking by fans as the original plans would have been a drastic overhaul of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. In August 2012, a draft of the script from Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec (Misson: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Wonder Park) leaked online under the fake working title “The Blue Door,” and the script seems legitimate, as Paramount sent a cease and desist letter following the leak.

In the script, the Turtles and Splinter hail from another dimension of animal-like warriors titled Dimension X, which in the comics and cartoons is where the villain Krang hails from. Shredder is reimagined as Colonel Schrader, a government agent who is secretly an alien who can grow blades from his body, while the Foot Clan is reimagined from a ninja group to The Foot, a black ops military unit under Colonel Scrader’s command. The lead character is 18-year-old Casey Jones, a security guard/amateur ice hockey player who fills a similar role as Shia Labeouf’s Sam Witwicky in Transformers, acting as the movie’s main character. April O’Neil is Casey’s girlfriend, and the two have relationship problems because she is moving to New York City for an internship at CBS. Michelangelo is no longer the comedic relief as that is now Raphael’s role, and Michaelangelo also has a romance with a Turtle woman from his homeworld. This was so different from anything fans recognized as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Why Did This Script Get Written and Damage Control

Following the extremely negative reaction to the script, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles co-creator Peter Laird trashing it, the studio went into damage control. Bay said the leaked script was one done before he or Platnum Dunes signed on and quickly rejected it, although that doesn’t match the timeline as Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec were announced as joining the project in June 2011, one year after Paramount Pictures brought on Michael Bay and Platnum Dunes to develop the film.

The fact of them being aliens might have also explained the name change. While Michael Bay claimed the title Ninja Turtles was a request by Paramount Pictures to be a simple, streamlined name, it also appears it was done as the characters had been reworked from not only being mutated turtles but also downplaying the fact that they were teenagers. Bay said the characters would still act like teenagers. Still, there is nothing specifically coded about the depictions that make them teenagers, an element that would carry over into the subsequent rewrites and finished film, as a big criticism of the 2014 film was that the characters did not seem like teenagers.

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In February 2013, the film’s release date was pushed from December 2013 to June 6, 2014, as they had brought in Evan Daugherty (Snow White and the Hunstman, Divergent) to rewrite the script, with filming beginning shortly in April 2013. When Daugherty was brought on to write the script, this was also around the time Megan Fox landed the lead role of April O’Neil, beating out studio favorites like Anna Kendrick, Jane Levy, and Elizabeth Olsen. Casey Jones was still going to be April’s love interest, now a cameraman for her, but it was then changed to the character of Vern, played by Will Arnett, with Casey Jones being introduced in the 2016 sequel, Out of the Shadows.

The release date for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will be delayed once more from June 6, 2014, to August 8, 2014. This was done officially to not compete with Michael Bay and Paramount Pictures’ other big summer movie, Transformers: Age of Extinction. Yet another reason not directly stated might have been to accommodate some big reshoots to fix a major whitewashing problem the filmmakers made.

A White-Washed Shredder

The new rewrite did change Shredder from the Colonel of a black ops military unit to once again the leader of the Foot Clan, yet the filmmakers went about changing the character’s race. Shredder has been there since the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic and is seen as their arch-enemy. He is typically Oroku Saki, who has deep ties to the origin of Splinter in the animated series, original comics, and previous live-action feature films.

For the 2014 reboot, actor William Fichtner was cast to play Shredder now with the anglicized real name of Eric Sacks instead of Oroku Saki. This version would also have a deeper tie to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as he would have been the one to create them, in effect creating his greatest enemies directly. The idea of turning one of the comic’s most famous Asian villains into a Caucasian role upset many fans. It was not until late into production that the filmmakers decided to change it, and Tohoru Masamune stepped into the role of Shredder.

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The changes/reshoots are clear in the finished product, with Sacks now appearing as a student of Shredder. All of the Shredder’s scenes with Sacks are now isolated with no other actors, and the Shredder scenes in the armor are easy enough to where the voice actor could be replaced, but with additional scene shots to explain Shredder and Sacks now being in two separate locations when it was clear they were meant to be the same character. Yet this now means this new Shredder has no connection to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Splinter. This change was made so late in production, and the idea of Eric Sacks as Shredder was so far into the movie’s development that the movie’s Nintendo 3D-S tie-in game still features Sachs as Shredder.

The 2010 live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise burned out quickly. Despite the big box office numbers of the first one, it did not translate to positive word of mouth. The sequel bombed two years later and led Paramount Pictures to scrap a third movie. The franchise continued on through animated series and now has been given new life with 2023’s animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which will continue with the animated series Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and a sequel in 2026 while a live-action R-rated movie based on The Last Ronin comic is being developed. The Turtles franchise is still going strong, but it almost looked a lot weirder, and one has to wonder if the alien origin might have been a Last Airbender-level disaster for the series that they luckily avoided.