Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Cast Includes Jackie Chan, Ice Cube, John Cena Despite a Modest $70 Million Budget

Last Updated on: 5 August, 2023 | 4:20 PM

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem made it to theaters a week earlier than originally planned. It has been amassing rave reviews since its first screening at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, earlier this June. The movie came after the failed live-action duology of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

Mutant Mayhem opened with a whopping $10.2 million and is projected to earn $40 million in its first five days. For a moderate budget, the cast ensemble for this sparkles with how star-studded it is.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem‘s Epic Caste

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutant: Mayhem managed to get a terrific star cast, even though the film budget rounds up to be $70 million. The movie has Jackie Chan playing Splinter, as the turtles’ adoptive father, John Cena as Rocksteady the physical strength of Superfly’s mutant army, and Ice Cube as Superfly, the primary antagonist. Producer Seth Rogen cast himself as villainous Bepop and the list goes long.

It seems that to have a cast comprising of these big names, Mutant Mayhem makers have followed in the footsteps of Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse. They kept the animation style alike and cut off on the production budget, to make a cast like this happen.

With a cast this dynamic, it would be a shame to risk the chemistry of a scene. Thankfully, the filmmakers knew better than that and made sure they did everything to make the most of the cast. Producer Rogen applied his experience from Lion King for this film:

“For every session, we lumped people together. So every time the four turtles were recorded, they were together. I and John Cena were Bebop and Rocksteady, and we recorded together. Ice Cube has a bunch of scenes with the kids, and they are recorded together. So we really went out of our way and bent over backward on Ninja Turtles to try to capture that improvisational energy that you get when a lot of people are in the same place at the same time.”

Fans are excited to see the fantastic performance a cast like this can deliver.

Making of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

The reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise began when Ramsey Naito was appointed as President at Nickelodeon. After the live-action failures, animation was decided upon. The film went under development in June 2020.

Film producers Jeff Rowe, Seth Rogen, and Evan Goldberg wanted the film to emphasize the teenage aspect of the turtles, and to make it a coming-of-age film. Rogen touched on the subject in an interview saying:

“As a lifelong fan of Ninja Turtles, weirdly the ‘Teenage’ part of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was always the part that stuck out to me the most. And as someone who loves teenage movies, and who’s made a lot of teenage movies, and who literally got their start in their entire profession by writing a teenage movie, the idea of kind of honing in on that element was really exciting to us. I mean, not disregarding the rest, but really using that as kind of a jumping-off point for the film.”

In Mutant Mayhem, the four turtles can be seen as living their life as normal high schoolers, trying to make a place of their own in the world and navigating life as mutants. The film takes a how-it-all-came-to-be arc on the Turtle’s lives and engages the viewers with the origin story of mutants.

If Mutant Mayhem keeps up with its initial trends at the box office, future prospects for the film are looking good.

Source: Collider

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