News Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles The 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Are About to Cowabunga Onto the Big Screen Again Hope they’re showing it in theaters that serve pizza. By Molly Templeton | Published on June 30, 2025 Screenshot: New Line Cinema Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: New Line Cinema If you were a certain kind of child of the ’80s and ’90s, Elias Koteas was IT. He was a surly punk in Some Kind of Wonderful (the actual best John Hughes-written movie) and he was Casey Jones in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The only Casey Jones necessary (with apologies to all those who have come along in his wake). The 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film was not exactly high art—and it is, shall we say, very of its time. But it did help me survive babysitting a screaming redheaded terror. And one of the film’s greatest qualities is—as James Whitbrook so aptly puts it at io9—”Judith Hoag and Elias Koteas creating a pre-Mummy cinematic bisexual crisis as April O’Neil and Casey Jones.” Naturally, a film like this needs an anniversary release, no? And that’s what it’s getting courtesy of Fathom Entertainment: Two nights! In cinemas! With additional footage! Here’s the synopsis Fathom provides: Four baby turtles come in contact with a mysterious substance called ooze and then are transformed into human sized crime fighters. The leader of the turtles is a human sized rat who has come into contact with the same green ooze. The rat was a former pet of a ninja master and therefore uses his skills to train the four turtles in martial arts. They befriend a local journalist and with her help attempt to find the group behind a crime wave in New York City. Starring Josh Pais (The Station Agent, A Beautiful Mind), Elias Koteas (Zodiac, Fallen), and Judith Hoag (Armageddon, Cadillac Man).The turtles live again… In the “Turtles Unmasked” featurette before the movie, produced in collaboration with the creators of TMNT: Evolution, Mutation & Reboot, experience never-before-seen footage from the archives, extended scenes left to history on the cutting room floor, home-recorded behind-the-scenes footage, and 1-on-1 time and commentary with the Director Steve Barron, as he reflects on the day-to-day in crafting the absolute best version of Turtles brought to the big screen. The absolute best! Look, they said it, not me. Director Barron has most recently been working on an assortment of televised murder mysteries—and the David Tennant-starring Around the World in 80 Days. As for the Turtles, they’ve been quite busy; I truly cannot begin to summarize the number of TMNT projects, cartoons, games, and comics that have been running since Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird created the Turtles in the 1980s. The latest movie version, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, came out in 2023; a sequel is due in 2027. Get your tickets for these limited showings of the first TMNT film from Fathom Entertainment. Side note: The runtime of this film is 1 hour 40 minutes. This is a normal runtime for a movie about mutant turtles, or any other kind of mutants, for that matter. Marvel: take note. [end-mark] The post The 1990 <i>Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles</i> Are About to Cowabunga Onto the Big Screen Again appeared first on Reactor.