I doubt the franchise would go back to cgi animated even though I think when all is said and done the Imagi movie probably made a better profit especially with the toy sales but it would just be too confusing for the audience to have the franchise bounce back and forth between cartoons and live action.
Maybe in a hypothetical future where TMNT is revived in a highly successful live action series you could have an animated spin off like the Lego Batman movie or the upcoming Spider-Man animated feature but for right now live action is the only way to go.
As for how the turtles would be brought to life, surely the only option left would be to use men in costumes with cgi to animate the faces, correct for where the suits look rubbery and assist with stunts etc.
Going the full capture route seemed so expensive that giving the turtles decent screen time was a problem in the 2014 movie and you can tell they cut some corners in the sequel. Given how badly Out of The Shadows performed I doubt any studio is going to give a TMNT movie the kind of money to go the fully motion captured rout again...not unless someone in a position of power really sells a TMNT revival as a something worth that investment.
Besides the very reason to go that route was basically shot down in flames by the actual movies. I mean we got the facial recognition aspect justified that for the first time we could see an actors real performance and depth of emotion except neither of the two movies really had much in the way of the turtles showing the kind of emotion you would think could only be portrayed by actual actors. Looking at behind the scenes footage the actors did what looked like deliberate cartoon-like performance which doesn't look as if it was meant to convey realistic portrayals. Most of the reviews for both movies contained some praise for the four turtle actors but not a single one ever said that it made the turtles seem more real than the Henson movies.
The whole motion capture with facial recognition seemed to be done (at least from Platinum Dunes end) for bragging rights of how great and cutting edge the movie would be. I don't think they put much thought into whether it was a good fit for the franchise or whether they could pull it off.
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Originally Posted by IndigoErth
Although being more expressive will require that mocap also be a part of it. Not going to get nearly the same degree if it's just CGI animated by hand.
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I would argue otherwise. From interviews we know in making the first movie Platinum Dunes insistence on using the very latest software which is often buggy resulted in a lot of times the facial recognition technology failed to capture the actors faces so ILM had animate from scratch.
Besides isn't the mo cap technology not really simply recording an actors movements and transposing them onto a cgi character but rather giving the animators a very detailed reference material to work with in animating the characters. Not really that different to when an illustrator uses a book of anatomy as a reference to what a human actually looks like in certain poses as opposed to imagining it.