🐢 Every ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Movie Ranked, Including ‘Mutant Mayhem’ 🐢

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem (2023)

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg have penned some of the funniest movies of the past two decades. It makes sense then that their iteration of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, directed by Jeff Rowe, would also be the funniest. It also happens to be the most heartfelt and sincere, thanks to Mutant Mayhem being the first Turtles film where its lead characters actually feel like teenagers.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

Thirty-three years later and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles still remains such an impressive experiment, it’s hard to believe it actually succeeds. Borrowing from Eastman and Laird’s comic book, and the more kid-friendly cartoon series, Steve Barron’s film settles on the perfect blend of tone. It’s just serious enough so that the stakes feel real but light enough that the absurdity of the concept can be taken in good humor.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016)

The follow-up to the 2014 reboot saw director Dave Green take the helm, but for all intents and purposes, it’s still Michael Bay’s fingerprints all over the film. The same rules of the previous film apply, there’s just a lot more of…well, everything.

In the same way the 1990 film was influenced by its proximity to Batman (1989), the 2014 reboot shares quite a bit of its DNA with The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), connecting Shredder (who’s mostly devoid of personality here) to the lab work that created the Turtles, and ending with a final battle atop a skyscraper. Perhaps the film’s biggest controversy was the drastic redesign of the Turtles, whom people claimed looked like everything from Shrek to the Cave Troll from The Lord of the Rings, but in all honesty, just look even more like anthropomorphized turtles.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

The Michael Bay-produced reboot directed by Jonathan Liebesman ushers the Turtles into a new era for a rollicking good time, complete with all the best and words traits of Bayhem. It’s big, noisy, and sometimes immature, but visual slickness, cool action scenes, and decent humor make up for a bloated plot. The film pushes April O’Neil (Megan Fox) front and center as she investigates the Foot Clan and a group of human-sized, crime-fighting turtles who she discovers were created by her father under the codename, “Project Renaissance.”

Nostalgia is a wild thing. Believe it or not, some folks who will go unnamed actually preferred this sequel to the first film as kids. Upon rewatch they might have been wrong. But, as far as a kids’ movie goes, The Secret of the Ooze is a good time and feels closest to the Saturday morning cartoon of the era. Shredder returns, along with the Foot Clan, looking for revenge on the Turtles, and discovers the secret behind their origins – the ooze, and uses it to increase his power, becoming the Super Shredder – which means more muscles and more poorly placed costume blades.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (1991)

TMNT (2007)

After the third live-action film kept the Turtles dormant from movie screens for nearly 15 years, there was a lot of expectation surrounding their first animated theatrical feature, TMNT. Did it live up to it? No, not really. The animation still holds up pretty well and there are some definite highlights, including the rooftop fight between Raph and Leo, and the vocal performances from Chris Evans and Sarah Michelle Gellar as Casey Jones and April O’Neil, respectively. But narratively there’s very little that’s memorable about it, despite the idea of the Turtles reuniting after drifting apart years ago being a solid foundation. The emergence of 13 monsters from a parallel dimension, also being sought by Shredder’s second-in-command, Karai, who now leads the Foot Clan, brings the Turtles back together, and narratively it isn’t a total misstep.

Alongside Batman and Spider-Man, the Turtles have had the most consistent luck with their onscreen history. And this week, the Heroes in Half-Shells are back on the big screen for the latest reboot, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. To celebrate, The Hollywood Reporter has definitively ranked the theatrical Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies from the most bogus to the most bodacious.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III (1993)