5) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Josh Appelbaum & André Nemec
When the script for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hit the Internet a couple years ago, it started quite a shitstorm – literally. Fans of the franchise were not happy with the script and how the story completely changed up the titular characters’ origins. Even the Turtles co-creator Peter Laird himself openly expressed… how should I put this… disappointment towards the script. And thus, people had yet another reason to make endless death threats to producer Michael Bay.
Now, first off – I think it’s best to mention that I am not a person to tell you what your opinions should and should not be. If you’re a hardcore fan of the heroes in a half shell, then I do get it that you want to defend the story you so love, no matter what. I’m not here to take that away from you. But I do want to say the following. And I will. God have mercy on me. Here it comes… The script is not as bad as the Internet makes it out to be.
Appelbaum and Nemec are great, smart writers (see: Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol), and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the story itself – it just took too many liberties and tried to be a bit too original. But I still don’t think it’s that bad. Though, that might be because I don’t consider myself a hardcore fan of the franchise. Maybe it’s best if you see for yourself.
Codenamed “The Blue Door,” the script follows Casey Jones and how he comes across the four sharply-named turtles. To put it short – it’s what you’d expect from a Turtles movie.
The movie was rewritten completely (surprisingly by the same guys), and eventually hit theatres in August. The story might have been changed up entirely, but interestingly enough you can still spot some familiar scenes from this script.
Regardless of the Internet’s response, it still is a good read. It’s interesting to see how much they actually changed and what they chose to keep in and in my opinion, it’s a lot better than what we ended up getting (see below).