Entertainment
Paramount Cancels Fan-Anticipated Upcoming Movie, Proving They Have No Clue
By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fans were hit with the news that the R-rated film, The Last Ronin, has been canceled, and a television series spinoff from the successful Mutant Mayhem film has also been canceled after only two seasons. Instead, Paramount wants to “Sonic-fy” the franchise, which should terrify longtime fans of the Heroes in a Half-Shell.
On August 7, 2025, Skydance Media officially merged with Paramount, putting Skydance CEO David Ellison in charge of the new entertainment juggernaut, and already, he’s made sweeping changes to the studio’s future plans. No one knows what to expect from Star Trek moving forward, though the latest news is that John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein are working on a new film, but Trekkers are coming out of the merger better off than Ninja Turtle fans.
R-Rated The Last Ronin Has Been Canceled
The Last Ronin was going to adapt the blockbuster graphic novel series about the last remaining brother on his quest for revenge by killing The Shredder’s grandson. Dark, gritty, and filled with amazing art, the five-issue series was a huge success that helped revitalize the Turtles for the generation that grew up on them, so much so that it’s been a best-selling graphic novel for the last two years. Nobody director Ilya Naishuller was attached to the R-rated project that promised to be wildly different from every other Turtles movie.
Paramount’s new owners didn’t want the first live-action Turtles project in a decade to be a violent tale of revenge. Instead, fans can enjoy a live-action/CGI hybrid featuring CGI Turtles interacting with live-action human characters identical to the Sonic franchise. Considering the three Sonic the Hedgehog films have made over a billion dollars, it’s understandable why a studio would decide against taking a creative, artistic risk that moves a 40-year-old franchise forward in a new direction for the safe bet of an uncreative family-friendly film.
A TMNT Reboot Already Happened This Decade
Except they already did a family-friendly movie in 2023, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and it was incredible. Adapting the Spider-Verse animation style for the Turtles resulted in a gorgeous film that, thanks to Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and writer/director Jeff Rowe, felt like a brand new start for the Turtles and their mutant friends. Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a Paramount+ original series, explored the new status quo for the heroes, earning a perfect 100 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes for its inaugural season. Season 2 is set to start airing on December 12, but it’s a lame duck season thanks to the executive’s decision to start over, again.
Every generation has had its own version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but there’s never been a series that has tried to retain older fans, and by older, they could be teenagers themselves, until the announcement of The Last Ronin. Now that it’s not happening, and the Mutant Mayhem sequel has been pushed back to 2027, even that might be canceled in favor of the “Sonicfied” new version of the radical reptiles.
No one is quite sure what the executive decision to “Sonic-fy” means exactly. Still, it’s worth remembering that the original Sonic the Hedgehog design was pure nightmare fuel. Without the incredible work of James Marsden and Jim Carrey, those movies could have easily been disasters. And who knows, maybe The Last Ronin would have bombed, but at least for once this decade, a studio would have tried something new and different. Instead, fans can look forward to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles taking a step backward, and once again, deciding that longtime fans of Leonardo, Donatello, Raphael, and Michelangelo don’t matter.
