TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES co-creator, Peter Laird, is not a fan of the script that leaked on the internet earlier this week. He’s taken to his blog in order to blast the script. NINJA TURTLES, as it is now called since they are now aliens and not mutants, was not met with positive fan reaction after it was announced that Michael Bay and his production company Platinum Dunes would be taking on the project. It received even more hatred at the changes in the origins of the heroes. Paramount reportedly cut the budget and pushed the film back from Christmas 2013 to May 2014.
The leaked script, dated January 2012, featured Casey Jones and April O’Neill as 18 year old lovers and had a visit to Dimension X, with Krang, Bebop, and Rocksteady. On his blog Laird wrote:
I think all true TMNT fans should be grateful to the new “powers that be” that they did not allow this wretched thing to go any further. It could definitely be taken as a good sign if that is the case…I think the script that I read is so fundamentally flawed, and — more to the point — so NOT a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, that trying to make piecemeal changes to it in an effort to make it into something halfway decent is probably a fool’s errand. In my opinion, the thing should just be tossed out, deliberately forgotten, and the process of generating a new script really a new outline, then treatment, then script — should be started again. I have no insider knowledge of what’s going on with the movie, but from the bits and pieces that have slipped out, it seems like that may be exactly what is happening.
The other half of the TMNT creative team, Kevin Eastman, is on board with the project, and you can read his defense of Bay here. Bay has also gone on record with the following statements where he says the script is nothing like the final project.:
Fans need to take a breath, and chill. They have not read the script. Our team is working closely with one of the original creators of NINJA TURTLES to help expand and give a more complex back story. Relax, we are including everything that made you become fans in the first place. We are just building a richer world. The leaked script for NINJA TURTLES that different sites continue to comment on was written well before I, or anyone at Platinum Dunes, was involved with the project. That script saw the shredder a long time ago. This is tired, old news – wait for the movie!
Despite Bay’s pleading, the fact remains that they are changing the origin of the Turtles. I really can’t understand what Bay is trying to do here. I know that the arrival of this film doesn’t erase any previous incarnations of the characters, but we haven’t had a really good version of a TMNT film yet. Laird had some more things to say about the script:
While we’re on the subject of this script… I have to say that while reading it, and especially reading the last twenty pages or so, I couldn’t help but think of the brouhaha which erupted a few months back when Michael Bay was heard to say that in the upcoming movie, the Turtles would be revealed to be “from an alien race”, and following that, all the mental gymnastics indulged in by people who wanted to parse his words and make it seem like “No, he didn’t REALLY say they were going to be ALIENS!”… and then this script makes it way out onto the Internet, and if it is legitimate, it’s painfully clear that YES, the Turtles WERE, in fact, going to be ALIENS.
We can only hope that this continuous negative backlash will stop this film dead, or at least make them revise their position on how best to adapt the source material. Let’s hope MAN OF STEEL doesn’t have Clark as a normal boy that is mutated by radioactive waste.
Source: First Showing & Den Of Geek
