TMNT: Mutant Mayhem's Original Draft Was 'Fundamentally Broken' And Totally Overhauled [Exclusive]

The heroes in a half-shell have had quite the break away from the big screen but now they're back as "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" has hit theaters. It's early, but in the early running, it very much looks like this is going to be one of the big surprises of 2023. Critics have widely embraced the movie thus far (read our review here), with audiences catching on in a hurry. While the movie that exists ended up being an absolute home run, it was a painstaking process to make it so. Particularly because the original draft was a broken mess relatively late into production.

/Film's own Ethan Anderton recently spoke with the film's director Jeff Rowe, who explained that the initial draft of "Mutant Mayhem," which he co-wrote alongside Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, was "extremely different." It contained Shredder as a villain, for one thing. But the bigger issue is that the version they spent a very long time on Donnie, Raph, Mikey, and Leo going to high school after the first act, and that version of it simply wasn't working.

"It was a high school movie. It was really hard to make the Turtles' life intersect with a crime villain plot in a natural way. Also, they got exactly what they wanted on page 30 of the script. So you just had to reset the movie 30 minutes in and then introduce a bunch of new characters and other kids in high school and new relationships and it was just so tedious. But that was the movie that we had all agreed to make when we started."

Without getting into spoilers, the movie we ended up with is very much an origin story for the Turtles as they emerge from the sewers and try to become heroes to the people of New York City. That's where the crime villain plot comes into play, with Ice Cube's Superfly serving as the main villain. It would have been tough to get there in a natural way if they were also trying to do the whole "now the Turtles are in high school" fish out of water bit. The way in which Rowe realized things were broken sounds, to put it lightly, very stressful.

"I think Seth and I first broached that with each other maybe in a text message or something, but it was like, 'Okay, I don't want to say this out loud, I'm just going to say this out loud. It's kind of scary, but I think the movie is fundamentally broken.' And everything that we've assumed it has to be needs to change completely.' When he voiced that, I felt like terror because he was 100% correct. It was like, 'Yes, that's absolutely correct. We have to completely change everything. We don't have time to completely change everything. Let's figure out how to completely change everything.' I feel like that was only last summer."

Generally speaking, an animated movie takes a long time to make. So the idea that Rogen and Rowe only realized a little more than a year ago that they needed to restructure the entire thing is hard to truly process. In some ways, it hardly even seems possible. But they knew what they needed to do as storytellers, and Paramount Pictures apparently backed that decision, regardless of how disruptive it was.

Rowe elaborated a bit on the timeline that they were dealing with when this realization hit them. "That was July of last year," the filmmaker explained. "And then over the next four months, we completely rewrote, re-boarded, and made the film essentially what it is." That is dizzying to consider, especially for anyone who was working in the animation department. One can only hope that those poor souls weren't worked to the bone in attempting to rework the entire story.

What's even more shocking about all of this is the fact that "Mutant Mayhem" reportedly carries an insanely reasonable $70 million production budget before marketing. How on Earth did the team manage to keep the budget so low while restructuring the entire story this late in the game? It's impressive, no doubt. Especially when looking at other recent animated movies such as "Elemental," which cost $200 million, or "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse," which cost $100 million.

Not only does the movie not carry the burden of an obscenely large budget, but Rowe and the team turned in a film that people love, setting up this franchise to succeed potentially for years to come. To that end, Paramount has already announced a sequel and a two-season TV show on Paramount+. Cowabunga, dudes.

"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" is in theaters now.