Live-Action Ninja Turtles Hybrid Movie Planned

It turns out that Kevin Eastman’s post that I wrote about just before turned out to be a lot of hot air. All told, had I continued reading, I might have found out, but that was a story I’d had in my RSS reader and really wanted to comment on.

I’m really happy with what I’ve found, though, as it seems I was on the right track with my own ideas for the film. As I said in the last post, the CGI film captured the Turtles like never before, and it would have been a shame to lose that ability by moving back to the costumed variety. But, according to an interview with the other Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles creator, Peter Laird, there is a live-action and CGI Hybrid idea on the table that I think has great potential, as long as the turtles are designed well enough to fit in the real world.

As it stands now, there is no intention of doing another live-action film like the first three, with actors and stuntmen in actual Turtle suits, contrary to what was said by Kevin. We have pretty much decided that the next “TMNT” movie should be what we’ve been calling a “hybrid” – that is to say, live-action humans and sets combined with very realistic CGI Turtles (and possibly some other CGI characters).

Now, when it comes to the storyline for the film, it appears that they have yet to decide where to take the story. This is another good thing, as a re-imagining is something that I think would be regrettable. That being said, they’ve yet to decide, so it still might happen.

The storyline for this new “hybrid” movie has not been settled on yet. We’re still batting some different ideas around. The sky’s the limit. My preference would be a story which fits into TMNT movie continuity in some way. But nothing has been decided.

Something else that he brought up, which I had not considered, until I learned about the hybrid style of the film, are the characters of Casey and April, portrayed by Elias Koteas and Judith Hoag in the first live-action film. Laird believes they might be too old to return to those roles, even if they wanted to.

However, I think Chris Evans and Sarah Michelle Gellar did wonderful work voicing the Casey and April characters in the recent CGI “TMNT”  movie, and I think it would be really cool if we could get them to reprise those roles, but this time “in the flesh.” I think that might be the first time something like that has happened.

Laird goes on to say that he is 95% happy with the CGI TMNT film. There are things he would have changed, and things he would have put into it, but other than a few minor details, it might just be what has convinced him to look into the hybrid idea if he had not been thinking about that before:

As much as I loved what Jim Henson and his crew accomplished with those rubber suits in the first “TMNT” live-action movie, I believe that CGI – especially now that it has reached the incredible level it has these days – is the way to go to realize fantastic creatures like the Turtles. The expressions the animators were able to get on the Turtles in this last movie were simply amazing.

This just gets better and better!

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