What if the Alien script had been put into production?
 

Yes, obviously it would have been awful but how do you think it would have been received? How much money would it have made? What would the impact on the rest of the franchise have been?

In case you don't know, here are the basic elements:

• The Turtles are indeed aliens, they just think they're mutants because Splinter lied about it.
• Their biological father was some kind of great warrior who fought against Krang.
• Bebop and Rocksteady are running around looking just like in the cartoon.
• Shredder is some kind of alien disguised as a human, not an utrom using the name Oroku Saki and the Shredder outfit, but rather a military officer who is some spiky creature underneath.
• Casey is a security guard.
• April is an intern at a news sation who later gets a job as an internet journalist.
• Krang tries to bring the Technodrome to earth.
• The movie ends with the Turtles going their separate ways to prevent portals to Dimension X opening up again.

I think it would have gotten a huge backlash and done poorly.

But at the same time, there would be a huge subgroup of apologists defending it just because it said "TMNT" on the label, arguing that "The franchise needs to Evolve or Die" and that "It's just a NEW version! It's not for you old f*ckers anyways, maaaaaan!"

So... pretty much like BayTurtles and Rise, just from a different angle.

Yeah but Rise and Bayturtles does not change anything this fundamental, I'm not sure you'd find as people defending it. That is course unless they basically start out with the alien version and ignore what came before, ahem... "Alien Town"...

Fewer people, sure. But they're ALWAYS gonna exist.

There are, and will always be, people who will get hard for anything that says "TMNT" no matter how different (or awful) it is compared to what's come before. And they'll find any reason they can to justify the unjustifiable.

You could take those concepts and still make something 10x better than what we got. But the execution would have been just as awful, so I suppose it’d be like a negligible 5% worse than what we got.

Pass. I'm not feeling that I wish we'd gotten this just because of what we did get.

Edit: With the fandom seeming divided on what they do and don't like it's hard to guess how well it would go down or not over the net. I imagine on here it would still have been a similar situation to how 2014 went down?

What's worse, you'd get the buttons saying it actually makes more sense for the Turtles and Shredder to be aliens than the actual lore and blah blah blah..

Then I'd get banned for a week for calling everyone sheep.

Then Andrew wouid post pictures of plants.

It would be a madhouse.

What I find bizarre about that leaked script is how much contempt it seemed to display for the classic TMNT storyline. It's initial description of the turtles made them sound like complete losers. Splinter misleading his songs into thinking they were mutants as a silly story you tell children doesn't stack up when you think what they came up with was much stupider.

From interviews it was clear that they were dead set on the idea of re-imagining the TMNT story but had little idea of what they wanted to re-imagine it into. They were just doing it out of the flawed belief that because this was a new iteration of the property it must be re-worked.

Wasn't the movie we got the "alien" one judt with the alien origins removed? Thats why they sucked.

Sounds like a pitch from your typical, Hollywood asshole making a "stunning and brave" wall covered in $#!(.

this thread has already been done, but good to see other people wondering the same.

No. Out of the Shadows does have broad similarities to the Alien script, which is mostly just FW aping. The fake backstory in the Alien script have some similarities to the actual backstory in the first one but you could argue both were just taking a page out of IDW. But in general very little of it made it into either movie.

Would probably only be liked by people who are even below the most casual fans and have zero attachment to the Turtles; purely Bay fans who just like explosions.

Some of the Blue Door writing (not story) was better and suggested some really good visual elements in some parts of it (though a movie probably wouldn't have turned out as well as the screen play sounded anyhow), but the allover story is just crap that basically isn't the TMNT and just seems like some concept they had sitting around and wanted to force the TMNT to star in, just have to fill the names in the blanks. And the ending... while I get they were trying to go for an impact it's actually a rather depressing, heartbreaking end to it because they split them up and they supposedly would never see each other (nor Earth) ever again.

Part of the good stuff with the Turtles is the fact that no matter how different they might be, where it really matters they are still Earthlings and belong here with us. To take that away really stinks. To take them away from each others... yeah, no, don't. Not unless you're exploring something like Last Ronin.

Pretty much.

And there was a ton of backlash online when it was originally announced the Turtles were going to be aliens in the Bay movie. But the script changed and then the backlash was all about Shredder being a white dude named Eric Sachs.


Yeah, sounds about right.

How close to production was The Blue Door script?

You meant the alien script? Let's see here, the movie was originally going to come out in 2012 and Bay announced the alien origin in March 2012. I'm gonna guess it was going to go into production pretty soon after the announcement.

Yeah, I know the movie was intended for Christmas 2013. I'm more thinkig of what might had happened if Michael Bay skipped that March 2012 press conference? Or never said something about the changed origin of the Turtles at all.

Even if Bay hadn't made the comment he did it would still have come out that they were changing the turtles origin.

If anything it would have been worse because at least with Bay's throwaway comment a lot of people thought he'd misspoke. Liebesman even tried to conflate it with the original comic book TCRI origin; at least some people bought it. If it had come out later then no one would have believed their attempt at damage control and it would likely have been too late to change it.

Come to think of it, why do Hollywood execs think these kinds of ideas are worthwhile? I can kind of get the desire to be different just for the sake of it but ever go this far?

I don't think that alien script would have in any way been any worse to see as a movie than the Seth Rogen movie. And not at all in a good way. I just mean that neither version really has anything to do with TMNT at all.

From what I remember, I think The Blue Door had the potential to be a more entertaining movie than what PD put on screens.

Totally agree. It was at least different enough that the bizzare premise would have been interesting, at the very least.

But what we got was a neutered and dumbed down version of what we’re already used to. But with hideous/lame character designs and no real reason for Splinter and Shredder to hate each other.

Had that script had been used it would have been the kind of ethical drift we see at Marvel - moving from what a core audience wants and expects into some other strange sensibility. Sort of like if Marvel turned Tony Stark into Dr. Doom and cast male characters as women while nonsensically swapping races.

... But...

Uh.
Correct? Same thing. Only that it would have then manifested in the movie which would have made TMNT aliens as well as what they did in that "very well received" Rise cartoon.

I mean..... I mean honestly, what was your point there? :lol: Basically that they did it in Rise although we weren't talking about "what if they did the alien thing in Rise"?

What's the actual, well connected point? I authentically want to know what you were getting at...
Where you trying to defeat my point? Because there is no connection there other than they race-swapped in "rise".
Where you trying to enhance my point? Because that would require more than just saying "But?"

I mean seriously, what was that?

:lol: You guys, man.

This thread title drives me insane and makes me think I’m living in an alternate reality where “Alien” was never released in 1979 lol

You know, come to think of it, everything from this alien script that did make it into the actual PD movies aside from old TMNT stuff is some of the most generic crap you can imagine.

"The villain gotta get the things to summon the thing"
"The main characters are unique and the thing from them will allow the villain to do the thing after decades"
"The human protagonist di not quite reach their goal by now but if they do the thing they will"

It's legitimately hard to tell if they absolutely wanted to do these things or if these things are so generic anyone who doesn't care will do them out of sheer disinterest. On one hand I think it's a fair assumption that clichés just develop because writers notice what works and just don't try anything new because they have no passion, most badly written movies are just like that, feeling like the script could have been repurposed from any random project. On the other I know of stuff like the Avatar movies, in which the themes and plot points are generically cliché as all hell but at the same time can't be the result of indifference, because I know they're the result of a guy spending literal decades trying to perfect his ideas. I'd wager it's the former but still.

Don’t forget the snowy hill action set piece!

Which has of course been done True Lies, James Bond 10, Indiana Jones 2, Where Eagles Dare, James Bond 15, Inception, Police Story 4, The Revenant, James Bond 19, Vertical Limit and James Bond 24.