In an interesting reversal of Disney’s quest for world domination, Saban actually bought Power Rangers back from Disney and sold it to Hasbro, who are planning on developing another Power Rangers movie, which is big news for the fan of the last Power Rangers movie.
It’s not actually known if Hasbro plans on developing a sequel to the 2017 reboot or if they’re planning on rebooting the franchise again due to the previous movie’s terrible script, plot and performance.
Power Rangers should have taught film studios many valuable lessons, perhaps the most valuable is that just having a diverse cast won’t automatically make your movie successful. Power Rangers has always had a cast that looked something like a Benetton ad or a CW show, and the film ramped up its diversity by adding Hispanic, LGBT and autistic characters to the already diverse cast, making it one of the most diverse films ever.
Of course, diversity and representation are good things for films to be doing, but not at the cost of everything else that makes a movie good. Power Rangers really only has two levers for you pull on: violence and camp. Power Rangers could work as an all-in action film, a sort of Crouching Tigerzord, Hidden Dragonzord if you will. Power Rangers has always been about big action, colored gunpowder explosions and crazy martial arts stunts.
The other direction is camp. Power Rangers took a dumb, goofy Japanese children’s show called Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger and made it even dumber and goofier. Play that up and make a comedy. You’ve got a robot and a guy in a test tube hanging out with six teenagers all day fighting a woman with a plastic cone Madonna bra who dances with her henchmen. Play into that. Take a page from the Night Flight Dynaman dub and play 80’s pop music over the fight scenes, go over the top with the colored gunpowder and have the giant robots be played by a guy in a foam rubber suit.
Amazingly, the 2017 Power Rangers film gave us neither of these. With only a few action sequences that seemed mostly perfunctory and a severely lacking sense of humor, it played like a very special episode of Degrassi where Caitlin Ryan gets attacked by aliens. At least it wasn’t as bad as Turbo, though.