Bay "Turtles" Ninja'd

Crack the bubbly and break out the unconventional pizza toppings - Paramount has indefinitely shut-down production of the (awful-sounding) Michael Bay produced TMNT reboot! The reason? Apparently, the script is terrible - who could've guessed, huh?

This is almost-certainly good news for Turtles fandom, and even better news for film critics who'll now have one less Michael Bay movie to endure next year (the film is still on Paramount's "schedule," in much the same way that Warner Bros. is still super suuuuper cereal about "Green Lantern 2;") but it's just the latest in what has been a spectacular slow-motion implosion at Paramount. Just last month, the studio was "forced" to yank it's mega-hyped, highly-anticipated "G.I. Joe" sequel from the Summer schedule for massive (expensive) reshoots and retooling so close to 'last minute" that the merchandise is already in stores. Last week, it was revealed that the already troubled production of the zombie-actioner "World War Z" now includes a ballooning budget and the shooting of an entirely new third-act.

It sucks to be Paramount right now - they had a huge few years in the blockbuster business, but it was for distributing movies made largely outside the studio itself i.e. the Marvel Studios films and the Spielberg/Bay/Hasbro-backed "Transformers" trilogy. When Marvel started being absorbed by Disney (the only reason your not seeing mass-layoffs at Paramount now is that a contract agreement entitled Paramount to a bigger-than-you'd-think share of "The Avengers" massive haul) and it briefly looked like Bay would bow-out of the robot business after "Dark of The Moon;" Paramount scrambled to get new tentpoles set up to take their place... and it looks like the haphazard results of that scrambling are now coming home to roost.

It's likely that the film will still get made, though probably not in the form that was taking shape at this point: The project was set up principally by Paramount's fellow Viacom-underling Nickelodeon, which paid a small fortune to buy the rights from multiple sources including Haim Saban (who, in turn, went and bought his "Power Rangers" baby back from Disney, who suddenly had other things to pay attention to in the "action figure farming" department, and round-and-round it goes...) and is still set to launch a new series this year.

Bay is still supposed to be making "Transformers 4" for the studio as part of a deal to get his Mark Whalberg/The Rock bodybuilder-crimespree project "Pain & Gain" released. I was getting the sense that TF4 was on it's way to falling by the wayside, but at this point they kinda HAVE to make it - it's the only sure thing they've got in the pipe now.