Mutant Mayhem’s Marketing Mistake With Scumbug Made Filmmakers Furious [Exclusive]

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!