Ever since the news broke that Michael Bay’s Ninja Turtles relaunch will be changing their backstory and consequently removing the word “Mutant” from their name, fans have been freaking the f*** out. To quote Michael Bay, “Take a breath and chill.”
Remember: Michael Bay’s allegiance isn’t to fans of the TMNT corpus. They’re going to go see the movie anyway. His job is to make a CGI-fest that everyone else will go see. And if TMNT co-creator Peter Laird is on board, it’ll probably be okay.
You are joking, right? For most people, if you’re a fan of something that iconic and someone says “We’re changing everything about this but keeping the name, well, not really even the name.”, that’s a good time to be concerned. When the reply is “Chill.”, that’s a GREAT time to be concerned. At least with Star Wars it’s the guy who wrote it altering it to his whim, but it’s still concerning.Here, it’s just a single person changing folklore for people because *he* want’s to.
It’s not a single person, it’s two screenwriters, one of the co-creators of the original franchise, six producers, who knows how many studio executives, and probably the director they’re courting – that’s somewhere between nine and dozens of people who are all involved in the development of the project and have some say in whether this is a good idea. And they’re not changing everything about it, they’re changing one element of the backstory. To give a comparable example, Tim Burton’s Batman put the Joker into his origin story. That pissed a lot of people off, but it was still a great movie. Why? Because the backstory is not, inherently, what makes a good movie, or even what makes something iconic.
And, for the record, Bay’s full response: “Fans need to take a breath, and chill. They have not read the script. Our team is working closely with one of the original creators of Ninja Turtles to help expand and give a more complex back story. Relax, we are including everything that made you become fans in the first place. We are just building a richer world.”