The Mirage Group, who owned the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and brought us the all CGI TMNT, has sold the entire global property rights to children’s brand Nickelodeon for $60 Million. The deal includes the movies and shows, as well as the rights to all merchandising.

It’s been in a news a few times recently, but in case you haven’t heard, a brand new Ninja Turtle movie is on the way. The movie is to retract from that CGI style that they tried and move back into the glorious world of live-action. To ensure an even greater realistic quality, it is expected that they will use the same methods used in Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are in which people are put into highly-detailed costumes and only the facial expressions are created using computer effects. Hopefully, the end result will be similar to the Ninja Turtles we saw in the ’80s and ’90s, but with a whole lot more realism to them.

One of the main concerns with this new project was whether they would aim the movie at a younger audience as they always have before, or if they would finally make a darker, more adult aimed movie for the original fans of the Turtles who are all now in their 20s and 30s. If today’s news is any indication, it will be the former yet again.

Considering it is Nickelodeon who made the purchase, one would have to think that this means that they will be planning to keep anything Ninja Turtle related to an “all-audiences” standard. Nick also has plans to produce a new CG-animated TV series for the Turtles, and both it and the movie are planned for release in 2012. It’s worth note that Nick’s sister studio, Paramount Pictures, will be the ones producing the new movie, so it will be interesting to see how they plan to handle the two and how similar or different they might be.

Where the Wild Things Are has also managed to make a darker movie with a PG rating, so hopefully that sets up a template for others wanting to pull it off. It will surely help that Wild Things producer Scott Mednick will also act as a producer on the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie.

[Source: Variety]