Geekisms!

Michael Bay famously booted Megan Fox between the second and third installments of his Transformers series due to personal differences, but apparently the two have since decided to kiss and make up. Bay has just announced that she will be joining his upcoming Ninja Turtles reboot, making her the first official bit of casting for the Jonathan Liebesman-directed film. Hit the jump to keep reading.

Bay revealed the news via his personal website, writing “TMNT: we are bringing Megan Fox back into the family!” Variety adds that Fox will play April O’Neil, and that the studio met with several actresses including Jane Levy, Anna Kendrick, and Elizabeth Olsen for the role. The character started out in Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird‘s original comics as a computer programmer, but is probably better remembered for her TV cartoon incarnation as a television reporter.

Paramount put the brakes on the project last summer to work out script issues, so we don’t know yet what the new plotline will be. However, an older draft of the script that made its way to a TMNT fansite indicated that the protagonists of the film would be not Leonardo, Michael, Raphael, and Donatello, but Casey Jones, a security guard and amateur hockey player. (Think of how Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky led the Transformers series.) If that’s still the case, April would likely serve as the love interest.

While Fox’s casting announcement is the first, we can expect to hear many more in the coming months. The project is expected to shoot in April, for a release date of May 16, 2014.

On a tangentially related note, Bay’s wording raises the question of whether the “Teenage Mutant” part of the title has been added back in. Last year, Paramount’s decision to drop the first half of the name drew fire from fans worried that Bay and Liebesman were changing the characters into non-teenage non-mutants. We haven’t heard any word of a title change, though, so it’s just as likely that Bay is simply using the common abbreviation for the characters.

Source: /Film