8. It's Going To Be Tame
Of course, Turtles was never an rated-R affair to begin with; it's always been hugely popular with kids and always will be, so Bay and Paramount will be tailoring things again towards that demographic, yet even within that remit, all signs point to a staid, dull, safe movie. For starters, the studio originally hired scribes Matt Holloway and Art Marcum to hash out the script after being none too pleased with John Fusco's original screenplay, which hewed close to the more gritty tone of the very first comic book iteration. The Holloway and Marcum script was then passed over in favour of Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec's heavy re-writes, diluting things further down to something that scarcely resembles the characters we know and love (something we'll expand on in a moment). If this film is going to work, it needs to be closer in tone to the silly fun of the live action guy-in-suits movies rather than the overly cutesy TMNT CGI film from 2007, which made Splinter look like a sweet little mouse rather than an awesome rat sensei.