Sweet fucking crippled skunk on a road! What the hell sort of morning is it where you wake up to read in VARIETY that John Woo is directing a CGI hard edged dark TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES movie. Now before you cynics go apeshit angry on this.... Go read those original 12 issues or so.... The EASTMAN / LAIRD work. The stuff that truly kicked the ass of the world. I loved those books when I was in High School. I taught my sister to read, and would read their stories to her before putting her to sleep. My Sis was 9 years younger than me and was fascinated by the comics.... a full two years before they went MAINSTREAM... I'm talking the oversized black and white issues... not the ARCHIE years...
This announcement in VARIETY today couldn't come at a weirder time... Tonight, in Austin, Texas... at the magical ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE.... TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES is opening a weekend run. And that first Turtles film was damn fun. DAMN FUN. Watching the trailer last night before KILL OR BE KILLED just made me smile like Vincent D'onofrio in a Kubrick flick.... I love the turtles. I remember when Kevin Eastman walked up to my table at the Dallas Fantasy Fair and we went into negotiations on a John Severen CRACKED Magazine piece of Cover Art for the Summer Spectacular.... the year of UNTOUCHABLES.... remember it? Well, Kevin was in the midst of MEGA-HYPE... that was the year Turtles hit... the beginning of a $4 Billion Dollar machine... all from pen and pencil and paper.
A $40 to $60 million dollar hard edge original roots Turtle film? Could this be Eastman and Laird deciding to finally getting the Turtles back to what made them so popular... the original vision? We'll see, but in the meanwhile... We're faced with a world that has John Woo directing a gigantic budget TMNT movie.... and I can't wait to see the original at the Drafthouse tonight.... it's going to be wild!
The picture's estimated production cost will fall between $40 million and $60 million. No Hollywood studio is attached to co-finance or distribute the project. The picture is tentatively scheduled to hit theaters in Christmas 2002.
