Resurfaced poster art for unmade TMNT 2 teases Shredder

The 2007 animated Ninja Turtles adventure TMNT, while well-regarded, didn’t get a sequel but a poster for one with their archnemesis The Shredder looming was recently dug up.

Coming out in 2007, TMNT stands by itself among feature films based around the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It’s the only animated entry, by computer or otherwise, released theatrically and though it was followed by a rebooted series with a similar animation style airing on Nickelodeon years later, it didn’t get any direct follow-ups of its own.

The film did well enough at the box office, however, and there were plans for a sequel that would have reincorporated the one major element absent from the picture, the villainous and unrelenting Shredder. TMNT did feature the Foot Clan – and no Turtles story is complete without them – but the daughter and second in command to their menacing leader, Karai, took over duties in his absence.

A TMNT poster that shreds

But he would have returned and, as a newly surfaced poster proposed for the ditched TMNT 2 shows, it was going to mean big trouble for the four bodacious brothers and their Master Splinter. Gaze upon it and what could have been here.

Shredder looms large, his bulging, wicked and inhuman eyes staring downward at Michelangelo – the last turtle standing after discovering his brothers and sensei reverted back to their helpless animal forms. While this tableau conjures images of the grim and recent Last Ronin storyline where Mikey had to fight a despotic Foot, led by the Shredder’s grandson, all alone and avenge his family, TMNT 2 wouldn’t have gone that dark.

It wouldn’t have even pre-figured the same story, it turns out. According to Animated Views, writer-director Kevin Munroe wanted to use a 13-issue saga by Peter Laird, a creator of the Turtles, called “City At War.” Michelangelo would start feeling like the “odd man out” and join the Foot while his brothers run afoul of Karai and Shredder in Japan.

Rebooted Ronin

Munroe had a trilogy planned but he left the company that produced TMNT, Imagi Studios, and they soon went bankrupt. Before they folded, they came up with the poster art above with hopes of selling the movie to investors and distributors.

It’s fun to contemplate what an animated Turtles film trilogy would be like even with the other reboot produced by Michael Bay and its sequel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows (2016), fresh in the rearview. Two more reboots are in development, one Seth Rogen is behind and another from Bay, but neither appears interested in finishing the work Munroe started.

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