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Mar 30, 1990 · by. New Line Cinema and Golden Harvest. Publication date. 1990-03-30. Topics. teenage mutant ninja turtles, tmnt, tmnt 1990, new line cinema, golden harvest, jim henson, steve barron. The 1990 film adaptation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, with the 1988-94 New Line logo restored.
- Mar 30, 1990
- 530
- B.A.D. Agent
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Oct 7, 2021 · In 1990, music video director Steve Barron cracked the code on combining superheroics and laughs with New Line Cinema's sleeper hit "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles," which went on to...
- Kevin Eastman reminisces on the seismic impact of the original TMNT movie.
- The TMNT’s Early Years
- Bringing the Turtles Into Live-Action
- From Certain Disaster to Box Office Bonanza
By Jesse Schedeen
Updated: Aug 12, 2023 12:50 am
Posted: Aug 5, 2023 3:00 pm
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Turtle Mania has returned. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are returning to the big screen in the animated film Mutant Mayhem, which delivers a whole new take on the iconic Heroes in a Half Shell. But for many Turtles fans, nothing can quite compare to the very first live-action TMNT movie.
The origins of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles phenomenon can be traced back to 1984, when creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird first got together to spearhead Mirage Studios and self-publish the original TMNT comics. At that early stage, Hollywood wasn’t even a consideration. Eastman and Laird simply wanted to make a living writing and drawing comics. With the first issue being funded through a combination of a tax refund and a loan from Eastman’s uncle, there was no guarantee there would ever be a second.
Fortunately, the new series quickly found an audience, making it possible for Eastman and Laird to focus full-time on their new business venture. The TMNT comics grew steadily in popularity over the next several years. That was followed by the premiere of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series in late 1987 and the Playmates Toys action figure line in Summer 1988. By the end of the decade, Turtle Mania was really beginning to take hold.
As Eastman explains to IGN, that’s when conversations about a Turtles movie really began to gather momentum.
“When a guy named Tom Gray approached us, he represented a company called Golden Harvest. They were best known for some really fantastic Jackie Chan movies. They brought in the incredibly... I can't say enough about how gifted and talented Steve Barron the director was. They brought in a writer named Todd Langen who wrote the script. And the icing on the cake could not have been better, Steve Barron's relationship with Jim Henson, they brought in the Henson Company to create the costumes to help bring these Turtle characters to life. And it was literally a perfect storm of things that lined up and allowed that opportunity to happen the way it did.”
To Eastman and Laird, maintaining creative control over the project was critical. Self-publishing the TMNT comic made that level of control possible, allowing Eastman and Laird to avoid the struggles faced by so many comic book creators - like their hero Jack Kirby - who signed away control of their most famous creations.
“The success of the comic and through a series of interesting sort of events, people that crossed paths, agents and people that discovered the Turtles and called, there were several that we said no to, or any further exploitation of the Turtles, we just didn't feel comfortable with them," Eastman said. "But when we met our agent and the agent through all the early years, a guy named Mark Freedman, he seemed dedicated to the commitment that Peter and I would only move forward on any Turtle project, any the other entertainment form that we had full control over."
With Golden Harvest and director Steve Barron on board, the TMNT movie started to take shape. But one thing that quickly became clear was that the movie wouldn’t simply recycle the approach of the animated series, regardless of its massive popularity. The film is much more heavily inspired by the original TMNT comics, with the plot borrowing from early issues of the series.
At the same time, some of the now-iconic elements introduced by the cartoon - the color-coded bandanas, the Turtles’ love of pizza, slang like “Cowabunga” - still made their way into the story. The film was specifically conceived as a way to draw on the best elements of both incarnations of the franchise.
“That was for all ages, kids of all ages, squarely and fairly in that. In our first meeting with [Barron], he had actually gone through and had postmarked, posted sequences from Turtles issue #1, a couple of the other issues," Eastman said. "But in particular, we did a one-shot featuring a single Turtle, Leonardo issues, elements of Issues #10 and 11. And then he had crafted a basic concept of what the movie would be based on things and scenes from those original comics. But he also loved the cartoon show to an element, and he felt that there was definitely room for a lot of humor, because the original comic books were much edgier. They were not hyper-violent or anything like that, but they were definitely intended for an older audience. And he knew that it was a kids' film made for all audiences, but the original audience would be a younger audience.”
Even though Barron envisioned an all-ages approach to the Turtles, there’s no denying that the tone of the 1990 film is much darker than the animated series. That made the project a surprisingly tough sell for most Hollywood distributors. Everyone from Disney to Universal to Warner Bros. turned down the film.
“Tom Gray tells a story from back in the day where he basically approached every studio and was told no by every studio because it was too bizarre, too out there," Eastman said. "They felt it was too far-stretched as a concept, as I guess a kid's concept would go, the tone that Steve approached it as a director.”
In the end, New Line Cinema proved to be the one studio willing to take a chance on a darker, live-action Ninja Turtles movie.
Thanks in no small part to Henson’s team, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie finally took shape. But that doesn’t mean everyone had faith in the project. If 1987’s Masters of the Universe movie taught us anything, it’s that a popular toy line and animated series don’t automatically translate to box office success.
Still, Eastman managed to maintain a sense of perspective as the release date neared. He and Laird had already defied the odds by turning their small, self-published venture into worldwide craze. If the movie bombed, as some feared it might, the Ninja Turtles had still had a good run.
“We'd seen early on, they were sending us video footage of dailies and things like that, and we just felt so comfortable with it on so many levels. But it was a risk to the people that had invested a lot of money in the toys, in the cartoon show, because the possibility that if it did bomb, that was kind of the end of the series, they felt.”
Eastman continued, “When we first started talking with our agent, Mark Freedman, he said, ‘Typically, the path that an intellectual property of this type potentially can follow is you'll have an introductory year. If it sells through and it's accepted by an audience, then you'll have a kind of a boom year as a second year, and then the third year, you're in the discount bins, and that's it.’ So the lifespan of what the Turtles could become beyond the comic book was all pie in the sky to us. We were fully still vested in the comic book, and that's where the dream came true. So all these other things, we were very hopeful, but we didn't know until it went out there, what it would actually do.”
In the end, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie didn’t bomb. It proved to be one of the highest-grossing films of 1990, even becoming what was then the highest-grossing independent film of all time in the process. The film helped cement the TMNT franchise as one of the dominant forces in pop culture as the ‘90s began.
In many ways, Turtle Mania reached its zenith in 1990, but that was also the year that began to show just what legs the franchise truly had. The Heroes in a Half Shell wouldn’t flame out like so many ‘80s properties before them, but had the staying power to last through the ‘90s and into the 21st Century.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was released theatrically in the United States on March 30, 1990, by New Line Cinema. It received mixed reviews, but was a box-office success, grossing $202 million on a budget of $13.5 million; it was the highest-grossing independent film up to that time [7] and the ninth highest-grossing film worldwide of 1990.
Right now, the new Ninja Turtles movie is only available to watch in movie theaters, but we do expect the movie will stream on Paramount+ after its theatrical run. where to watch teenage mutant ...
