It’s learned there apparently won’t be a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3 movie following the TMNT sequel bombing at the box office.
TMNT 2 only made $245.6 million worldwide compared to the first movie’s near $500 million. In addition, the sequel didn’t even make half the U.S. box office as it brought in $82 million compared to TMNT’s domestic haul of $191 million.
A producer on the two TMNT movies, Andrew Form, filled in Collider that there won’t be a Trilogy, but did seem to insinuate the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise could be rebooted:
I don’t think there’s Turtles 3, but I wouldn’t say there’s never going to be another Turtles movie.
While TMNT 2 did add in fan-favorite characters such as Rocksteady, Bebop, Krang, Baxter Stockwell, Casey Jones, the sequel still didn’t resonate with fans, which surprises Paramount, and they can’t figure out what the problem is:
We were obviously surprised at the box office results. We loved the movie. We loved making the movie. From our first Super Bowl teaser to everything we launched, we felt so good about our material, and for some reason it did not find the audience that the first movie found. And we talk about it all the time, and we tried to figure it out, but we cannot put our finger on what happened. We really can’t. It’s just one of those things where we feel like we made a really great movie; we thought at the time that our release date was great, and we added all these new characters with Bebop and Rocksteady and Baxter Stockwell had a big role in the movie and Casey Jones and for some reason when it came to opening weekend…Even before the movie came out, we were feeling great. And you wake up two days before the movie opens and you go, “Wow, I don’t know if this movie is tracking as well as it should.” Then you hope, and then Thursday night happens and your midnights come in and you’re like, “That’s not what Movie 1 did,” and then sure enough your weekend comes and it’s nowhere near what anyone thought, and it’s nowhere near Movie 1, and, before you know it, it’s over. We’re still so proud of the movie; it just didn’t find an audience. We really don’t know why.
I think one thing we did learn is you really need to give—you can’t just add characters to a movie and expect that to be what’s fresh. It’s a sequel. You have to give the audience something that’s really new and fresh. Maybe just adding characters from the canon, that wasn’t enough.
