Paramount Pictures’ animated “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem” has crossed the $100 million mark at the box office.
The animated movie which was directed by Jeff Rowe, became the 18th movie of 2023 to reach that milestone.
The movie was the brainchild of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who wrote it with Rowe plus Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit. It featured a quartet of young newcomers voicing the heroic reptiles — Micah Abbey (Donatello), Shamon Brown Jr. (Michelangelo), Nicolas Cantu (Leonardo) and Brady Noon (Raphael) — in addition to Jackie Chan, Ice Cube, Ayo Edebiri, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Paul Rudd, Rogen and more.
The film took more of a street-level approach to the characters, similar to the early summer hit “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.” “Turtles” opened on August 2 with $43.1 million in its first week, but ended up with $28 million over the weekend, only allowing it a fourth place showing. Without much in terms of competition for family fare, it held on well for the rest of the month, slowly building up the money needed to hit $100 million.
“Mutant Mayhem” was not the first animated iteration of the “Ninja Turtles” or the first animated feature film. Many younger people may be most familiar with the Turtles from their animated series, which has remained fairly consistent on television going back to 1987. In March 2007, Warner Bros. tried jumping on that train with the animated feature “TMNT,” which only opened with $24.3 million and wasn’t even able to make $100 million in its worldwide release.
“Mutant Mayhem” is also only the third “Ninja Turtles” movie to make $100 million domestically, the two previous ones being the 1990 classic, which made $135.3 million, and the 2014 Michael Bay-produced live action movie – also released by Paramount Pictures – which is still the biggest movie in the franchise, having made $191 million.
As “Mutant Mayhem” also hit digital on Friday, it may affect the start of what will be the movie’s fifth week in theaters, where it’s also very likely to leave the top five.