Why the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Are Back in Theaters This Month

This Christmas, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are coming back to the big screen, and they’re pissed. You’d be pissed off, too, if you’d saved the city only to find someone stealing your likeness to make bootleg toys without permission. That’s where Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael find themselves in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Chrome Alone 2 – Lost in New Jersey, a short sequel to 2023’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which is coming to theaters December 19, along with The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants.

The film comes at an odd time for the Turtles because it’s still two years removed from the 2027 sequel to Mutant Mayhem and weeks after Paramount canceled a related animated show and announced it’s doing a second version of the Turtles for the big screen. So, where does Chrome Alone 2 fit in? Where did it come from? io9 sat down with the film’s director, Kent Seki, and producer Jeff Rowe to talk all about it.

A few months after the successful release of Mutant Mayhem, the powers that be wanted more. More movies, more toys, more Turtles. But, at that time, the feature was still at least three years away. “There was all this concern that we would lose the zeitgeist,†Seki told io9 via video chat. “So it was two things. It was, one, to get another thing out there that was directly from the Mutant Mayhem universe to sustain the crew, both on the vendor side at Mikros and on the client side at Paramount. And the toy company needed more things out there because they sold very well.â€

Andrew Joustra, who was a script supervisor on Mutant Mayhem, decided to throw his hat in the ring. “When he heard that they were gonna make a short, he dug down deep and, while he was doing his day job, wrote several different treatments,†Seki said. “And Jeff Rowe, the director of the feature who’s also a producer on this short, said, ‘Well, this one sounds the best.’ And over a weekend, [Joustra] wrote the whole script, submitted it with everybody else, and it was chosen.â€

That idea was a holiday-themed piece about the Turtles discovering someone was making toys of them without permission. Of course, toys are a huge part of the history of the Ninja Turtles franchise, so the idea worked on that level, but Rowe liked something else about it, too.

“When we made the first movie, there was such a drive from the studio to sell products, to make the Turtles muscular, to do all of these things,†he told io9. “I think people wanted us to essentially make the fake version of the Turtles in this short, but we held the line on that. ‘They’re teenagers. They can’t be that ripped.’ So this was a chance to engage in a meta way with the experience of making these films. I feel like it was therapeutic for all of us.â€

Seki, who was the director of photography on Mutant Mayhem, had been wanting to direct for years and was called on to take the reins. He was excited about that, but also the idea as a whole. “The excitement definitely was this idea of this meta-narrative,†he said. “Toys were such a big deal in the history of Turtles, and why it’s popular. A lot of people grew up with the toys or the TV series, and there’s a long tradition of knockoff toys that have existed. So it was sort of combining those things as well as the current climate around AI.â€

Yes, without giving away too much, when the Turtles investigate the origins of these bootleg toys (called the “Tubular Tortoise Karate Warriorsâ€), they track them to a factory in New Jersey, run by an AI robot named Chrome Dome (voiced by The Office and Silicon Valley star Zach Woods). His design and origins were a huge part of getting the short just right. “We first did a version of that film in which Chrome Dome was more of a security robot and didn’t have a personality,†Seki said. “And it was actually pretty good… But we felt we left something on the table. We were a little disappointed in ourselves.â€

“It was funny, and it played fine,†Rowe said of that early version of the film. “I was like, ‘This is totally okay. This could go out into the world. We’d all be happy.’ But we’re going for greatness. What if we made it more about these concepts? Then we did a whole rewrite very quickly to enhance it.†“We went back and said we have to do better,†Seki said. “And it was really that inspiration to do better that found the narrative around AI and made the robot an AI robot that ran the entire factory, and that’s when all gelled for us.â€

Adding more info about Chrome Dome also helped solve another problem: money. “Even though it’s Turtles and even though you think ‘Big studio, big budget,’ we had limitations,†Seki said. “We had at first a four-minute limitation on the CG portion of the short, and we were seven and a half/eight minutes long at this point. We had to find ways to stretch it.†So they brought back another company from the feature, Wizz, to do some 2D animation to help give the film the scope and humor they were after.

Then there was the title. As the film was being made, the title was “Christmas with Chrome Dome,†but no one really loved it. “There was some concern about having ‘Christmas’ in the title and wondering if that’s really the appropriate thing to do here, even though it is winter and it’s sort of a Christmasy theme,†Seki said. “We were just sort of batting around different ideas, and we were in a lighting review, and one of the artists said ‘Chrome Alone 2,’ and another artist said ‘Lost in New Jersey,’ and we all started laughing. We said, that’s got to be it.â€

So after doing about 50 versions of the logo and acquiring Home Alone licensing from Disney, the short had its title. It’ll be the first time fans see the Turtles after Mutant Mayhem, which Seki sees as a fun tease for Rowe’s 2027 feature. “This is the first time we’ve really seen the Turtles in the human society, accepted,†he said. “We shot with a longer lens in that opening scene in New York City because we specifically were inspired by the Safdie brothers and Uncut Gems and how they shoot New York City. Trying to compress the space and really smash the environment in and the people of New York together with the Turtles, and that’s something I think you’ll see more of in movie two for sure.â€

Rowe, who split his time between producing the short and directing the sequel, agreed. “[The short] helped scratch some itches because the feature takes place at one time of year. And, well, it’s not going to be winter,†he said. “We’re not going to be able to do snow in New York in the feature. So we still get to do that. We still get to use our art team and their incredible artistry to represent this very specific mood and feeling and season… And when you’re making a film about mutants who live in the shadows, you’re on rooftops, it’s at night, they can’t be seen by the world. [So] to be able to do cinematography in the streets, blocking as characters walk through traffic, capture the feeling of a season, it just felt so liberating to put them out in that world.â€

That still untitled feature sequel to Mutant Mayhem is still a few years from being put out into the world itself, but things remain full speed ahead. “There are a lot of parts that are now going into animation,†Rowe said. “I think the film will be fully animated by the middle of next year, and then we’re going to be lighting and comping and just working every day to put as much quality on screen as we can.â€

But, until then, the quality on screen with Chrome Alone 2 is very, very high. Catch it in theaters on December 19, along with The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.