TMNT: Mutant Mayhem's Marketing Mistake With Scumbug Made Filmmakers Furious [Exclusive]
This post contains mild spoilers for "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem," so beware.
"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem," as the title implies, features a plethora of mutant characters, and it's not just the titular heroes in a half-shell either. Led by Ice Cube as the villainous Superfly, there's a whole ensemble of mutants voiced by an all-star cast that includes Seth Rogen, John Cena, Rose Byrne, Paul Rudd, and more. However, one of the more grotesque mutant baddies isn't voiced by anyone famous at all. And it turns out the marketing department made quite the snafu in highlighting Scumbug when the character was given their own individual poster during the lead-up to the film's release.
When the big batch of "TMNT: Mutant Mayhem" character posters were released, each of the posters highlighted one of the film's characters and included the cast member who was voicing them. In the instance of Scumbug, however, the poster merely said, "Scumbug as Himself." That's largely because Scumbug doesn't speak words in "Mutant Mayhem," but instead the creature snarls, growls, and throws slime all over the place. However, this little identifier may now seem strange to anybody who has already seen the movie, because Scumbug is very clearly referred to as a female cockroach. In a forthcoming interview conducted by myself with director Jeff Rowe this week for /Film, he confirmed to us that this was a major mistake in marketing, one that made filmmakers "furious" behind the scenes.
'We always imagined her to be a female cockroach'
Scumbug is one of Superfly's many mutant henchmen, and despite her inability to communicate like the rest of the characters, Splinter actually takes a liking to slimy lady, and by the end of the movie, there's clearly a romance brewing between them. As director Jeff Rowe confirmed in our interview, Scumbug was always female, and he's not sure how the character came to be identified as "himself" in the poster campaign:
"That was a marketing mistake, and we were furious about it. They put that out, I don't know who did that or how that happened, but we were immediately like, 'That's not true. Don't put that in the world,' and that will now be on the internet forever. But that was never the intention. That was never the character. We always imagined her to be a female cockroach. And that one poster was a slip up."
So there you have it. We're betting that almost no one remembers that little detail from the character poster line-up, but since we pay incredibly close attention to these kind of details, and there were plenty of changes behind the scenes involving the film's story and the use of characters like Baxter Stockman, we wanted to find out if there was anything more to this little discrepancy. And now you know the rest of the story!
"Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem" is in theaters now. Stay tuned for much more from our interview with director Jeff Rowe soon!