Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Better for the little screen?

That seems to be the case so far, 

The 1990 and 1991 movies were hits when they came out, and presented state of the art puppetry that was groundbreaking for its time, but its third outing was a failure on pretty much every front and a fourth movie was never produced by the same creative forces. 

An animated feature was released in 2007 that was intended to be both a reboot and sort of a sequel to the original two films, but it flopped at the box office and sequel plans were thrown into the trash. 

The 2014 reboot did good financially and got a sequel made which had an even bigger budget but it underperformed and another full-on reboot appears more likely than a direct sequel. 

It is also worth noting that none of the TMNT films released thus far have done well critically, they all qualify as being "rotten" on the website Rotten Tomatoes. Audience reception is mixed on average, and very few fans of the brand I've encounter have labeled any of the movies as being genuinely great; solid enough,  stupid fun, decent, whatever - yes. 

Personally I feel the brand works better for TV than the big screen. It allows them more time to build onto their world and give every character their moment in the sun whereas on the big screen they can only do so much because of budgetary reasons. Another issue the movies have I feel is tone, I don't think any TMNT film released thus far has found a nice area in between the humorous and visceral aspects. Even in the 1990 movie, still regarded as the best one to date, the tone is all over the place, you have scenes that are pretty dark like when the Shredder is torturing Splinter, then in the next scene you have the turtles making really dated, extremely corny jokes that can be pretty eye rolling depending on how "into it" you are.  Parents took note of its questionable content back then and so the sequel was made much more family friendly, which was definitely not handled with an ounce of subtlety. Out of the Shadows is probably the most tonally consistent turtles movie to date, but its biggest achievement was in being silly, juvenile fun and nothing else, the writing definitely not something to brag about( Though I guess the subplot of "being who you are" wasn't handled poorly). On TV they just have more to accomplish and can tell as story in less than thirty minutes, and keep more characters around than a one and done deal on film. The popularity of the 1980's, 00's, and 10's shows I feel prove my point. 

But what do you think?