The Dark Knight has redefined the superhero movie - adding realism, emotional depth and an unashamed intellect to the genre.

From now on, audiences will judge all other superhero movies by The Dark Knight’s yardstick, with badly-conceived, opportunistic stupidfests created solely as cynical money-making exercises being exposed for what they are.

In other utterly unrelated news, someone’s decided to make a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. A real, live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. Whoops.

It’s always been there, but Hollywood’s current obsession with reviving old franchises is getting so compulsive that we’re starting to assume that all Hollywood studios are controlled by Rain Man.

They brought Rambo back, they brought Batman back, they brought Die Hard back, they brought Indiana Jones back, they might be bringing RoboCop back - and now, just to prove how truly strapped for ideas they really are, they’re going to bring Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back.

You don’t need to be reminded what Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was about, of course - four giant anthropomorphic tortoises who ate pizza, performed martial art as taught by a giant rat with the voice of the onion from PaRappa The Rapper and had an arch enemy that was basically a giant squishy bollock who sounded like Paul Daniels trapped in the belly of a giant robot Phil Mitchell. It probably wasn’t as good as you remember.

Anyway, someone at Mirage - who presumably realised that that one Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie from 15 years ago where everyone inexplicably ended up in feudal Japan hadn’t destroyed the franchise entirely - has decided that what the world really needs now is more films about green turd-looking creatures shouting skater slang from the early 1990s at each other. Slashfilm reports:

Following the success of the ‘TMNT’ theatrical release in 2007, Mirage licensing and Imagi studios have begun work on a new live-action TMNT film for 2010. It’s the turtles like you’ve never seen them before! Shellalicious!

Yes, cowabunga and etc. But even though it’s been announced and everything, there’s still a bit of confusion over this new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. The Playmates Toys website, which was the first to announce the film, has since dropped all mentions of it being live-action from its original statement. That means that the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie might just be a cacky retread of the rubbish TMNT CGI cartoon flick from last year. And that’s not shellalicious. That’s not shellalicious at all.

Still, despite our misgivings about another Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, there is one thing that will be able to set our minds at rest - the promise of another guest appearance by Vanilla Ice. Although he’d be hard pushed to top the majesty of this previous cameo. Enjoy…