Paramount Kills ‘Last Ronin’ Film In Favor Of Live-Action ‘TMNT’ Franchise From ‘Sonic The Hedgehog’ Producer
Like Leonardo, Donatello, and Raphael before it, the previously announced live-action The Last Ronin movie has been sent to the grave, with Paramount instead choosing to spend their time and energy convincing Sonic the Hedgehog trilogy producer Neal H. Moritz to work his same franchise-magic on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
First greenlit in April 2024 on the back of Mutant Mayhem‘s box-office success, the adaptation of the eponymous five-issue comic book miniseries was set to be produced by former DC Films boss Walter Hamada’s 18hz production company, feature script work from Child’s Play (2019) writer Tyler Burton Smith, and embrace its source material’s raw anger to the tune of an R-Rating – a would-be first for Turtles’ cinematic adventures.
And though its production status held through the Paramount/Skydance Media merger earlier this year, The Last Ronin – as well as the currently airing Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series – was cut down just a short time later as part of new CEO David Ellison’s aggressive campaign to right the studio’s financial ship with The Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit reporting on November 20th that the film “has been put back in the pizza box, according to sources.”
“That project was being developed as an R-rated feature, and had Nobody filmmaker Ilya Naishuller in talks to direct, but the new regime wasn’t keen on having the first non-animated movie in 10 years be a bloody, adult-skewing story,” wrote Kit. “One insider says the studio wants to leave the door open to possibly revisit it down the road.”
But far from kicking the entire TMNT franchise into the sewers, Kit also learned that Paramount had subsequently begun courting the aforementioned Mortiz, who in addition to producing the wildly successful Sonic the Hedgehog film franchise – seriously, the last time so many people actively cared about the Blue Blur was probably the early 2000s following the release of Sonic Adventure 2 – has also lent his services to The Fast and the Furious franchise and the Jump Street reboot duology, to craft a brand new live-action film franchise for the pizza-loving heroes.
That Moritz worked on the Sonic Trilogy is no mere coincidence, as “multiple sources” purportedly told Kit that “Paramount wants to ‘Sonic-fy’ the TMNT franchise, with one specifically admitting, “If you want Sonic, you go to the guy who did Sonic.”
As of publication, Moritz has not yet officially signed on for the job, nor has either party offered any direct confirmation that such talks were actually happening.
Meanwhile, the production shake-up has had zero effect on the upcoming Mutant Mayhem sequel (though as The Last Ronin proved, this could change at a given moment), which is currently looking to start a second-round of shell-kicking on September 17th, 2007.
