Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Makes Promising Box Office Opening as Fans Claim it Can Kill ‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’
Jackie Chan and John Cena’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem has opened with an impressive response at the box office.
The reboot of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series focuses on the Turtle brothers’ struggles to fit in as normal teenagers in New York. Things quickly take a turn when they find themselves against an army of mutants.
The movie has managed to earn $43 million at the domestic box office in the opening weekend, an encouraging figure that is only likely to rise as Barbie and Oppenheimer’s craze slows down. More importantly, the figure has already crossed the half line with regard to its budget of $70 million.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Being Touted to Outshine Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
Hailee Steinfeld-led Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – which follows Gwen Stacy, Spider-People, and Miles Morales’ alliance to fight supervillain Spot (Jason Schwartzman) in a fantastic adventure through the multiverse – hit the theaters early in June.
The animated film from Sony has been one of the year’s biggest hits and opened with a staggering $120.5 million weekend domestic box office collection. As far as this parameter is concerned, Jeff Rowe and Kyle Spears directed TMNT falls far behind Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, but some fans have liked the movie so much that they are backing it to ‘kill’ the Marvel comics-based project. And if the hype on social media is to be believed, TMNT might get closer to (and eventually overtake) Across the Spider-Verse‘s worldwide collection.
Before Mutant Mayhem’s release, it seemed Across the Spider-Verse had an Oscar for Best Animated Feature in the bag, but now it’s tough to separate both movies, which are not only similar in terms of beautiful animations and apt sound-tracks but also circle around the same theme of acceptance.
Both the four turtle brothers (sheltered from the human world) and Gwen (blamed for the death of Peter Parker) try to leave the burdens of the past and express themselves among new circles (April O’Neil and Miles Morales).
What might set the newly released movie apart from Across the Spider-Verse is its star-studded cast behind the animation. Apart from Chan and Cena, Ice Cube’s voice for insect supervillain, Super Fly is getting a lot of love from fans and critics alike.
What Seth Rogen Did to Make Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem Different From Its Predecessors
One of the reasons behind Mutant Mayhem’s early popularity is how connectable it has been to the younger audience. And that might have to do with Seth Rogen‘s (one of the movie’s writers) past experience of shaping high school comedies.
In an interview filmed prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike, Rogen explained his thought process:
“From the very beginning, our idea was to focus on the teenage part of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The first movie I wrote was Superbad, a high school movie. I’ve made a lot of high school movies over the years and I’ve always loved teenage movies. It was the one thing they never did with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They always had men in their twenties and thirties doing weird teenage boy voices and trying to emulate teenagers. So that was really where it started, was like what if we really focus on the teenage desire to be accepted and to be normal, and this kind of coming-of-age story, and what if we cast actual teenagers.”
The 41-year-old’s experiment has so far worked like a charm and even helped the movie earn a higher Tomato Meter rating of 96% (albeit with just 1%) on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, its producers and avid fans are hoping the movie does the same on the financial numbers chart.
Source: DiscussingFilm
