Paramount and Nickelodeon Animation’s Ramsey Naito on the Subway Grit That Inspired ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ and Sending ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ Beyond Bikini Bottom
variety.comBrent Lang Executive Editor It seemed like the end of the road for the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” The popular kids franchise had inspired a half-dozen movies of declining quality, with the live-action 2016 adventure “Out of the Shadows” suffering from the kind of withering reviews and bad box office returns that derail a film series.
But Paramount and Nickelodeon CEO Brian Robbins and Nickelodeon Animation and Paramount Animation president Ramsey Naito had an offbeat idea for how they could make the Turtles cool again.
That involved tapping Seth Rogen and his producing partner Evan Goldberg, the duo behind “Superbad” and “This is the End,” to give the characters an adolescent flair.
It didn’t matter that the pair’s main experience with animation, the very R-rated “Sausage Party,” was made for moviegoers of voting age and not for the pre-teens who are the biggest fans of Donatello, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael. “It was all about figuring out who is the coolest person we can get to bring something different to it, so it just didn’t seem like an imitation of what had come before?” Naito remembers. “We needed someone to push this franchise forward with multiple movies and shows.
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