It kinda feels like a fetish thing: “[WINNIE THE POOH: BLOOD AND HONEY director Rhys Frake-Waterfield] set his sights on another property…. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” I mean, I know that I’m supposed to get outraged by this concept. That’s the whole point: shock value.
But reality must interject itself:
- This dude will not get the rights to turn the TMNTs into a bunch of sewer monsters sacrificing humans to a rat god*.
- There is only a small chance that his upcoming horror flick is gonna make enough money to…
- …let him mess around with all the other now-public domain IPs out there.
So why should I give the dude the satisfaction of an angry response? Heck, what he’s striving for almost admirable, really. Sort of like GWAR, but without the sophistication and charm.
Moe Lane
*It’s not a bad horror concept, mind you. You could get away with it as a parody. But they won’t let you [expletive deleted] the original IP outright like this.
Considering they only got away with WtP by expired Copyright on the book and not Disney’s derivatives, I don’t see this one’s ROI path where copyright is intact.
Given the OG TNMT is inherently more violent and visceral, I don’t see how “shock”-value scales either.
To those of us who first encountered TMNT as an RPG, the shock value approaches zero,l.
Fetish? I suppose …
I think it’s more that there’s always someone wanting to “push the envelope” … but the envelope has been pushed pretty far already, so there’s limits to what can be done for shock and awe.
I kinda suspect Rhys Frake-Waterfield would have been a happier filmmaker in 1965 or 1975.
Mew
It seems like almost everything is some sort of fetish, these days.
The “Internet’s Rule 34” is older than the Internet, and probably as old as the oldest profession.
I mean it feels like people are publicly satisfying their personal peccadilloes, but I spend too much time arguing on Reddit.
I would say, “How does one make this pay?” – except that, ironically, my eldest informs me that the movie has already made ten times back its budget of $100K.