[Leo656]

The problem with relying on FW as the benchmark is that it WAS super-successful... with kids. Kids in 1988. That has practically NO relevance to what would be successful NOW. People who are 6-10 years old in 2021 give less than zero f*cks what their parents liked when they were their age. And there simply aren't enough 40-year olds with a strong nostalgic passion for FW TMNT to pack a theater anymore.

So the Powers-That-Be are stuck in a situation where they're trying to serve two masters with every attempted reboot - the 40-year olds who still care about FW TMNT, and their offspring they may be trying to "nurture" into caring about TMNT. Except that neither of those groups of people is especially large. Especially the kids' market, which is more fickle with shorter attention spans than ever. The little kids who were all-in on the Nick TMNT cartoon, for example, generally don't care about it anymore, they've moved on to other things. They can't even be bothered to be nostalgic for "a little while ago", let alone for a period that was decades before they were born. And this is anecdotal, but most kids I know who were exposed to the FW cartoon thought it was godawful, even if they liked some of the later cartoons. That's just generally how these things work, anyway.

The immediate problem becomes, as we've all heard countless times, "you can't serve two masters" to begin with. You have to decide who you're trying to please and commit to that. But they've been very hesitant to do that, thus far, and every time one of the people up top speaks, they go back and forth about who they're really aiming for with This or That reboot. They're either trying to "grow the audience by attracting new kids" or "giving the old-school fans what they want", depending on the day. And frankly, you can't do both at the same time. It generally doesn't work. It's worked very, very, very rarely, like the more recent MLP reboots, but even then, that's only because the originals were so bad that the franchise had nowhere to go but up. So you really can't compare something like that to something like TMNT which actually had a ton of success and popularity way back when.

Part of the reason why I lean towards the 1990 movie so much as an example of what they ought to try and lean into, is because that's the only example where TMNT ever achieved any sort of TRUE mainstream success, not just with young children. To this day, whenever I show that movie to someone who never saw it, or who thought TMNT was nothing but "stupid kids' stuff", it never fails to mesmerize them. "Holy sh*t, that's actually a 'real' movie!" It was the same back in 1990, when millions of grown-ups who only tolerated the FW cartoon show because their kids were obsessed with it, were legitimately captivated by the live-action film. Otherwise there's no way it would have become the most successful independent movie ever made, nor kept that title for years upon years. If the movie had been like the show was - something parents smiled through gritted teeth at just because their kids were so in love with it - then it absolutely would not have done so well. As evidence of that, we have the sequels, which were loved by children but had MUCH less cross-over appeal with adults and non-fans.

To my way of thinking, that means the 1990 film was the franchise's true peak, because it proved conclusively that TMNT did not need to just be goofy stuff aimed at 6-year olds, that if handled well it could also enrapture their parents, or even win over non-fans. Simply put, NO other iteration of TMNT has ever managed to do that. And thus, if they're sincerely trying to make a movie that both kids and adults in 2021 will enjoy, then their best bet should probably be to go back to the ONLY time that they ever managed to pull that trick successfully. Trying to stick to the blueprint of a cartoon show that was a huge hit with people who were 8 over 30 years ago is questionable if you're sincerely trying to reach a large number of people. Put simply, there's no proof it can even be done.

But they did manage to please "everybody", exactly One Time, and they made a lot of money with it. One would think that, in a situation where all other attempts have failed, they'd look at what went right that One Time and study THAT blueprint instead.

Of course, that would require that the franchise be handled by people with concerns beyond selling action figures. So they're more likely going to just keep fumbling along and wondering why nothing they try actually works.