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MTV Buy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – Heroes In A Half-Hundred Million
Shoes dropping all over the place. This time they're made of turtle leather.
Nickelodeon, part of MTV, part of Viacom paid Mirage Studios and 4Kids Networks around $60 million – of which $10 million was to 4Kids to terminate its rights in the property before it would naturally expire in 2012. They may also be up for a further $1 million in other fees. They will also continue to air Turtles cartoons for the rest of the year and the first half of next.
Then there's the Paramount movie for 2012 with an accompanying CGI TV series, expected to inject the property with new merchandising life and justifying its high eight figure purchase price. And why Nickelodeon/MTV/Viacom were keen to purchase all rights to the property immediately.
This is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles small-press comic by Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman as Mirage Studios that not only launched a worldwide franchise that made billions but broke the mould for the comics industry, allowed many other comics to come to the fore without necessarily having a large publisher behind them.
Turtle power, I guess.