Important News!

For which the world has been waiting.

Paramount and Nickelodeon Films' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles will now hit theaters on Aug. 8, 2014, two months later than originally planned.

Paramount has good reason for moving the CGI/live-action hybrid, which Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes is producing. This summer, the box office saw a glut of family movies, resulting in diminished returns for a number of films.

Had it stuck to its original June 6, 2014 release date, Ninja Turtles would have opened only a week after Disney and Pixar's The Good Dinosaur (May 30) and two weeks before Fox and DreamWorks Animation's How to Train Your Dragon 2 (June 20). ...

We've seen various incarnations of the oh-so-popular, oh-so-profitable NT franchise. Of course there was the original hand-drawn series (built off the comic book, as I remember), then there was the original big-screen franchise with actors in turtle suits. Then there was the CG movie from Imagi that also did passably well.

Our fine, entertainment conglomerates took a lesson away from this year's crowded summer schedule: Don't put do many family movies in ultra-close proximity to one another, because it doesn't enhance box office.

A year hence, we'll see how the strategy pans out. (Truth to tell, there will still be a lot of close proximity.)