could Mirage open up a animation/film studio like Marvel is doing ?
 

With Marvel having there own film studio should Mirage do the same for
future animated and live action movies ?

LOL, no way. Mirage still can't even figure out how to publish a profitable comic book.

Haha, Rose pretty much said what I was going to say. Besides the turtles, what would Mirage have to offer as material worth producing? If they've published anything else worth mentioning, please enlighten me. AFAIK, TMNT is all they've got, and they can barely keep that together at times.

It's not that Laird doesn't know how to publish a profitable comic, it's that he doesn't want to. And he's stressed that fact. Frequently.

But who knows what avenues might open up if Laird ever gets over his "I don't want to make money on my comic" fixation. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.

What's so bad with not wanting to make $ off the book? Hell he's making gazillions with all the other junk I'm sure. So he does the comics for fun...big deal.

It wouldn't be a bad thing if they were actually good comics. Even Tales, which manages to be decent most of the time, could be a lot more successful with just a little more direction and effort on Mirage's part.

That was what I was thinking. All I know Mirage for is TMNT, and doing a quick google search their other titles I've never heard of (except C.O.W.boys of Moo-Mesa). It'd be a waste of time and money to start an animation studio, especially when they can just use third parties like Imagi or 4Kids to do it for them.

Mirage are small beans up to Marvel. I can't see it happening.

===HERO

That's it exactly. Marvel is huge and has many properties that it can produce into movies. The X-men, Hulk, Fantastic Four, Spider-man, the Avengers all give Marvel a huge advantage in the "own your own studio" department. Mirage might be able to pull something off, if it could be kind of an independent comic production studio, but even then it'd be pushing it. Mirage's only big property is the TMNT, that's not enough to have their own animation/movie production studio.

And a different artist. Seriously Lawson has killed Tales, not for me, but for a lot of other people. The other day I called 30 different comic shops in my area and no joke over half of them don't carry turtles anymore. The ones that do still carry turtles only order enough issues to fill up the bins or a few extra for the shelf. It's pathetic, at least when the movie came out last year turtles was still doing decent in comic shops. Now no one carries anything but back issues from volume 1 and those ****** Dreamwave comics no one can seem to get rid of.

On the animation subject Mirage has tons of other characters they could make series or movies out of but they never use any of them anymore. Gizmo, Bade Biker, Commandosaurs, GRUNTs, Planet Racers, Bog Swamp Demon*Created by Ryan Brown*, I'm sure there's more but off the top of my head there ya go.

So, they can't just slap on a phoney "Mirage Studios Productions" logo on anything? I mean, they don;t have to produce anything, right?

A profitable book with greater appeal would help ensure that there would be more Turtles books in the future.

I don't think he'd even need to change much in order to make the books appeal to more comic fans. Maybe push the original volume 1 comics so more people realize there was more to the turtles than saying "cowabunga" and pizza addiction. I think a problem with volume 4 is that potential new readers had no jumping on point.

I hate to defend volume 4, but catering to any one other than your fans (specially when TMNT has a relatively small fan-base) is kinda dumb. Then on the other side of the coin he's not really catering to his fans either, PL's making what he wants to see, whacky sci-fi bull.

The only way I see TMNT becoming a successful comic book again would be to sell the rights to Marvel or (preferably) DC.

Why DC over Marvel?

Why would wanting to grow the fan base be dumb? No one is suggesting turning the Turtles into a teen drama or something. However, making the Turtles comics more accessible to more comic readers would probably be a good idea, instead of sitting around watching the fan base shrink until you can't make money from it anymore.

DC fan-boy here, but I don't have a problem with Marvel at all.

It's not dumb, depending on how you do it. How would you make it better for people looking to get into TMNT?

Or someone with less personal issues intervening with his decisions (like cutting out Issue 8 basically for no admitted reason).

Really, marvel would do bad things to TMNT (see quesada's comments. He's said it would take place side by side with bone and some stuff that really doesn't fit if he had is way) and DC tends to do badly with its "aquired" properties that aren't older than 50 years and integrated into their universe.

Yeah, TMNT doesn't need to be sold to some major corporation; it just needs Peter Laird out of the picture, plain and simple. He obviously doesn't have his heart in any of it anymore anyways. It seems like he hardly even goes into the office, instead opting to go riding on one of his billion motorcycles or buying just another motorcycle/similar toy.

TMNT needs someone working for them who's actually dedicated and full of motivation to deliver a good product, with the goal of that product being successful and profitable. Having those kinds of goals are necessary to delivery quality product.

Or maybe not even out of the picture entirely. I don't think him working as a creator, on HIS version of volume 4 is a bad thing for the brand, just his management.

Vol. 4 has driven more people away from the comic than actually like it - How is this a good thing?

Erm, out of people who read it. Truth is, most comic shop owners don't even know there IS or WAS a volume 4.

Anyway, that wasn't really my point.

All I mean is it would easily work as a laird-published Turtles "Future" book, not as the workhorse of the franchise.

Well I don't know much about Mirage but I do know DC/Marvel struggle with sales a lot. If the two largest comic companies don't really sell that much you can't expect smaller ones to do well, especially very small ones like Mirage seems to be. Comic books are pretty much dead and have a small niche fanbase.

Yea, but one of the most well known franchises in comics should be doing a wee bit better.

That's true, but both companies will be rich for enternity because of the movies and toys they're selling, so they'll always be able to afford the production of comics. Personally I think it comes down to kids, and the fact that they'd rather play videogames than read comics.