Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Movie/Production

On February 5th, 2019, Nickelodeon announced that it would be producing an original animated film based on Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for a Netflix release. The movie was planned separately from the series. Several of the movie's production crew members also worked on the Rise of the TMNT series. The movie was written to be accessible to audiences unfamiliar with the Rise of the TMNT series. Pre-production occured at Nickelodeon Animation Studio in California, the post-production sound services were at Boom Box Post in California, and color correction occurred at Warner Bros. Post Production Creative Services in California. The movie's animation was outsourced to Australian animation studio Flying Bark Productions, Top Draw Animation in the Philippines, Digitoonz Media & Entertainment in India, and Cartoon Conrad Productions Inc. in Canada.
Andy Suriano and Ant Ward spoke on the movie's production in the November 2022 Rise of the TMNT: The Movie TAAFI panel alongside Eric Bauza:
Ward: “So we were deep into story on season two. We had a season two and a season three story arc really solidly planned out. We got a nice, solid pick-up on season two.”
Suriano: “We had a pick-up on season three, too.”
Ward: “Oh, we did, yeah, we did. We had [emphasis added]. So we were well into production of season two, telling this overall story and it was a Saturday afternoon and we [Suriano and Ward] each got separately a phone call from our executive at the time saying, ‘Hey, Nickelodeon would love to do a Netflix movie of Rise,’ and we’re like, ‘Okay. Okay, cool.’ And there was a pause in there, she was like, ‘There’s one mandatory request.’ [We were] like, ‘Okay, what’s that?’ ‘It’s got to have something, while still being Rise, that is instantly recognizable to all previously established elements of the franchise.’ So we were like, ‘Okay. Cool.’ So then we were on the phone with each other back and forth.”
Suriano: "I was busy driving my way to Legoland with my family. We crafted it in a weekend . . . ."
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Ward: “So, yeah, we at the time were really keen on telling a Casey story. Thought it would be really, really fun . . . if we told a story that was quintessentially the traditional Raph on the rooftop venting, seeing Casey whaling, instead of on thugs, but seeing Casey whaling on a mutant . . . and then Raph makes the wrong choice. And little unbeknownst to Raph, Casey was the good guy and the mutant was the bad guy. He [Raphael] thinks his people are being put down, he’s having none of it, and there’s a twist. And it was gonna be a dimension-traveling Casey and he was gonna be like Kurt Russel and grizzled and like, ‘Casey Jones…’ [emphasis added, in a deep, rough, menacing voice]”
Suriano: “It was like herald of Galactus-type.”
Ward: “Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was really, really fun and, you know, Nickelodeon was like, ‘Let’s age Casey down a bit,’ and things changed, but we were still in season two! And we were deep in season two so at the time, we were in a almost executive producing-consulting capacity where we would be meeting with the then-director and the then-story team and working stuff out. And then, they cut the episodes of season two in half and they said, ‘You got up to here to finish it.’ We’d already done all these episodes up to that point in time, storyboards, animatics ready to go, but we hadn’t told the family story that we wanted to tell: Splinter’s story. Rise is so much about Splinter.”
Suriano: “We had it from day one, I mean, us meeting at the Thai restaurant, breaking [down] the whole story. I mean, we had a three-season arc specifically Splinter. It was all about a redemption story about a father and his sons.”
Ward: “So we halted production on the six episodes that were in the pipe and we had a very limited scope so we grabbed all the team together and we said, ‘Okay, we’re gonna try something crazy. We’re gonna try to, from scratch, finish this story.’ And we did . . . .”
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Ward: “And then, what was happening as well was fortuitously for Andy and myself, Nickelodeon opted to go in a different creative direction with the movie and dates aligned almost perfectly as we’d wrapped up pre-production on those six episodes so...”
Suriano: “Our peripheral involvement [with the movie] sort of became very…”
Ward: “Like, ‘Hang on a minute, we need to sit down with Ant and Andy to figure this out.’”
Suriano: “Yeah, we sort of steered that ship."
Ward: “The same thing happened again. The movie had been in production for a year, production completely stopped, and we went to a page one rewrite in January 2020.”
Suriano: “And we did everything over COVID, right? We were staying at home.”
Ward: “We had one [emphasis added] story break together in the writers' room.”
Suriano: “So we finished the series and almost the entirety of the movie over COVID.”
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Suriano: “We chucked six episodes to do four [episodes] to finish up the series and then we took over this movie where we lost a year and we made it up somehow . . . The reason why was because we had our team. Our team came back, everyone showed up. Usually when you get the call that, ‘Hey, the season’s over or the series is done,’ everyone immediately goes out—they’re all talking on their phones to their agents or wherever being like, ‘Hey, I need a job tomorrow,’ but every single person stayed. Every single person on our team stayed. They wanted to finish this story, it was very personal and important to them and . . . it was very touching . . . ‘cause they really could’ve gone anywhere. They were getting pulled from Spider-Verse and—everybody wanted our team . . . we’re very humbled that they all chose to stay.”
Ward: “And also as they stayed and we started to reenter production on the movie, they were actually able to roll off the show through to the movie, which wouldn’t have been the case beforehand. It would’ve been a whole different board team and whole different everything.”
Bauza: “Can you imagine having to retrain an entire crew for the movie?”
Ward: "Rise is a weird beast, Eric. You either get it or you don’t and that’s kind of unfortunately where we were at December [2019] where it just wasn’t working. So, thankfully we were able to bring our team in.”
Suriano: “Right. And then, we were able to get Flying Bark back for less—it was about 40% of the movie?”
Ward: “About 40, yeah, yeah.”
Bauza: “And Flying Bark is the overseas animation studio?”
Suriano: “Yes. We grew up with them, right? We scaled up our departments both overseas and our local department to compensate. I guess we really balanced each other out. I think that's the most important thing, especially when you’re working for a service studio or wherever, I mean, every single bit is important, every single person, every single—we never treated anyone like pencil pusher or a numbers cruncher or whatever—from every studio to every member of our nucleus team was important and we all fed each other. We created a pipeline, a very specific pipeline like Ant said. Because the show and the series and the movie was so hard, we demanded a lot from each other and everyone we worked with, but we had to really collaborate and communicate with all members of all the studios involved because we had to assemble a pipeline that specifically worked for our production. And having lost a year, specifically we couldn’t waste…”
Ward: “We didn’t get the year back.”
Suriano: “Yeah, so we had to approach this feature almost from a TV production standpoint, being like, ‘It’s gotta get out. It’s gotta hit these dates. How are we gonna hit these dates?' and kind of go backwards . . . Very little room for error.”
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Ward: "We had a big narrative issue because when we were originally pitching the movie, it was a dimension travel movie to get the bulky, rough Casey Jones because it was always the intention that the Rise Casey was always gonna be Cassandra for sure. So . . . as the dimension travel got maybe too complex for the younger audience and we turned it into time travel, we're like, 'Well, okay, we're not going back on Cassandra, but—'"
Suriano: "We dug our feet in, too, with that because they wanted to retcon it and we're just like, 'No, Cassandra is our Casey.'"
Ward: "She had her own story in the show and her growth."
Suriano: "And we really wedged that in. That was really important that we got some [emphasis added] scene in there..."
Ward: "To recognize her and that she wasn't retconned. [That] She was still in the universe, just kicking ass in her own way."
On January 12th, 2021, the first synopsis of the movie was released in a Deadline Netflix 2021 film slate article.
On March 30th, 2021, the movie's release date was announced by Ward who posted it on Instagram but then quickly deleted it for unknown reasons.
The movie was set to be released summer 2021, but its 2022 release delay was announced on August 27th, 2021. The movie finished production April 7th, 2022, announced by Suriano in an Instagram post, and its August 5th, 2022 release date was announced by Netflix on April 27th, 2022. The release date announcement was teased by Jason McConnell and JJ Conway in a Tweet on April 26th, 2022.
On June 30th, 2022, the first images of the movie were released by Netflix in a Netflix Family Summer 2022 promotion along with a pair of seconds-long movie clips and the movie's official logo.
On July 6th, 2022, the movie trailer was released by the Netflix After School YouTube channel.
On July 20th, 2022, twelve seconds of movie clips were released by the Netflix YouTube channel in a What to Watch August 2022 promotion.
On August 3rd, 2022, the movie's prologue was released by the Netflix After School YouTube channel.
Category:Production