What if Nick/Viacom had never bought the TMNT property?
 

Remember how everyone was unsure what was gonna happen after the 2k3 series ended? People wondered if Laird was gonna finish volume 4 and also feared there'd never be another TMNT cartoon, movie or videogame in the future. People feared the death of the property. Seems crazy these days, but the 2k3 series came out at a time where reviving older properties still wasn't that common like it is today. So people probably assumed that 2k3 was gonna be a one off thing that mostly existed due to Laird's efforts and then it would quickly fade away. The show, while successful enough, wasn't THAT big and the fact pretty much no one outside big TMNT fans remember it really speaks for its legacy.

So let's say the property would have gone dormant again after Turtles Forever and the 25th anniversary and that Nick/Viacom didn't buy it. What do you think it would have happened?

I'd say the franchise would stay dead for some more years until, perhaps, Disney acquired it and tried to put the Turtles in a crossover with Marvel characters like the X-Men. This decade has been full of revivals and remakes, and TMNT was a VERY big hit from the late 80s/early 90s, so I doubt the big dogs would have just let it die and not jump on the opportunity to revive it and cash on it while the retro nostalgia trend was still hot.

So yeah, probably Disney would have acquired the property eventually... would that really have been better? At least I doubt we'd have gotten the Bay turds, but perhaps we'd have gotten other crappy stuff as well.

Thoughts?

Pretty sure a million other threads like this exist but whatever.

Anyway, most probable outcome:

1. Peter Laird would most likely still just be signing contracts, might even have been less likely to finish V4.
2. Comics might still have been licensed to some other publisher, so basically the same thing that happened with IDW under Viacom.
3. No film studio would have the permanent license to TMNT, under Viacom all TMNT movies for the forseeable future will be under Paramount.
4. Somebody would always have been willing to get the license to make a TMNT cartoon, Peter would not have been as involved as with the 4Kids one but he might strike Bebop and Rocksteady off the list allowed characters.

I think PL would just be sitting on the property and not doing anything with it. He did say besides Nick he got offers to buy the franchise from a few other companies but turned them down because the price was, "insultingly low," so I guess it was far less than the $60 million Nick paid.

Overall I don't think anything would have happened and TMNT would have been dead since 2010 when the final Tales issue came out. Vol. 4 would be in the same spot it is now, there would be no cartoons and IDW would have not have gotten the license either. We might have gotten one movie, but that's it.

This, though Turtles Forever would’ve been a great sendoff for the franchise.

I think the state of the franchise could have been in a much worse state, i.e. no new TMNT at all for many years after.

Forever War
 

In the worst case, only a few reprints of Archie and Mirage, at least we would also have Forever War in August 2009.

I wouldn't be too sure about that. No work had even begun on that version of FW at the time of the sale.

Peter had talked about working on the John Fusco-scripted movie a few weeks before the sale. A CGI/practical mix was being tested, if I'm remembering correctly.

That was the biggest loss of the sale, IMO.

And for what it's worth, Kevin said the Fusco draft was the best Turtles thing he'd ever read, ever.

Before he compared the PD film to Avengers and Raid.

I do think that in this scenario, some other big company like Disney or Hasbro would've bought tmnt and the quality of the content would've not been too different from what we have now with Nick.

It might've been more popular though, because Disney and Hasbro are literally money juggernauts on a far greater scale than Nickelodeon, with both having greater brand recognition and advertising potential.

DC and Marvel Comics
 

I recall some speculations (much later) about DC or Marvel Comics.

In a way the only reason the PD movies were produced is that like most of Hollywood's output was made to compete with the MCU. The MCU whether you like it or not guys is responsible for how franchises are treated now.